On October 13, we welcomed Activision Blizzard into Microsoft and Team Xbox. As Phil Spencer, CEO of Microsoft Gaming noted on Friday when the deal closed: “Together, we’ll create new worlds and stories, bring your favorite games to more places so more players can join in, and we’ll engage with and delight players in new, innovative ways in the places they love to play including mobile, cloud streaming, and more.”
Our ambition in acquiring Activision Blizzard has always been to bring more Xbox games to more players on more devices. We have backed this up by committing to the European Commission to enable gamers to play Activision Blizzard games on cloud gaming services beyond Xbox Cloud Gaming. These measures are now in place.
There are two key elements to the commitments:
- A free license to consumers in the EEA that allows them to stream, via any cloud game streaming services of their choice, all current and future Activision Blizzard PC and console games for which they have a license.
- A corresponding free license to cloud game streaming service providers to allow EEA-based gamers to stream any Activision Blizzard’s PC and console games.
We stand fully behind implementing our commitments, and they align with our mission to reach players everywhere. Moreover, with these measures in place the European Commission predicted that the deal will “ultimately unlock significant benefits for competition and consumers” and will result in “a significant improvement for cloud game streaming” compared to what it is today in the European Economic Area and “boost the development of this dynamic technology.”
We already have deals in place with leading cloud game streaming services Nvidia, Boosteroid, Ubitus, and Nware to enable consumers that own Activision Blizzard games to stream their games on these services. We hope that many more cloud streaming providers will use our free license to stream these games to consumers in the EEA. These agreements, combined with the open licenses we have committed to the European Commission to provide, ensure cloud streaming and cloud streaming providers are poised to proliferate and grow in a way they would not absent this deal.
For consumers and cloud game streaming services that want to learn more about this opportunity, please visit our informational website at https://www.xbox.com/en-US/legal/activision-blizzard-cloud-game-streaming-eu.