Ubisoft believes streaming games will take off “very quickly” within the next decade

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot believes that if the publisher secures the cloud streaming rights to Activision Blizzard's properties in Europe as part of the Microsoft acquisition, game streaming will become much more popular in the coming years.

The details:

• Guillemot told the Financial Times that Ubisoft's streaming deal with Microsoft and Activision will involve a "one-off payment," and that once the deal is closed, the publisher will have exclusive rights to distribute its games via the cloud globally, as well as non-exclusive rights within the European Economic Area.
• Guillemot then compared the current state of game streaming to the state of movie streaming when Netflix first transitioned from physical media to its now widely used online platform. “When Netflix first said it was going to go into streaming, their shares fell a lot and they were widely criticized,” he said. “Today we see what they have become. It’s going to be the same with video games but it will take time. But when it takes off, it will happen very quickly.”
• The original Activision acquisition terms presented by Microsoft to the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) resulted in the deal being blocked in the region due to concerns about Microsoft's control of the cloud gaming space. Due to Microsoft's existing cloud architecture from its other divisions, the CMA believed that owning the rights to exclusively distribute Activision's titles could result in a monopoly if cloud streaming became the norm.
• Guillemot appears to agree that cloud gaming will expand in the "next five to ten years," with mobile technology being adopted in regions where consoles have yet to be widely adopted by players. "Countries that need to progress very quickly often jump to new technologies and skip old methods of the old systems," he stated. "So we think that [those regions] will move more quickly to streaming and the cloud than others.”

More gaming news:

• Capcom's COO has stated that he believes players should pay more for games to offset rising development costs. The executive claims that creating games is "100 times more costly," but prices for AAA titles have only increased slightly in comparison.
• Due to ongoing DDoS attacks, Destiny 2 players have been unable to play the shooter without experiencing network issues for the past week. Bungie confirmed the attacks early last week, with various in-game issues such as broken AI, inaccessible locations, and frequent disconnects persisting.