Microsoft & Activision Blizzard Offer a New Deal With Ubisoft To Appease The UK’s CMA

Microsoft’s Acquisition of Activision Blizzard is still ongoing with the final hurdle being the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority which previously rejected the deal on concerns around competition in the Cloud Gaming space. Microsoft has now announced a new plan to hopefully appease the CMA which involves a deal with Ubisoft.

Microsoft And Ubisoft Cloud Gaming Deal

Microsoft shared a blog post recently that details their plans to hopefully appease the CMA’s concerns surrounding competition in the Cloud Gaming space and involves executing an agreement with Ubisoft to provide the cloud streaming rights for all current and new Activision Blizzard games to the company over a 15 year period. Microsoft hopes that the CMA will see this as an improved transaction over the previous one submitted to the CMA in 2022 and hopes that the CMA will approve this before the deadline of the deal on the 18th of October.

Benefits For Ubisoft

On Ubisoft’s end of this deal, they will pay for the streaming rights with a one-off payment through a market-based wholesale pricing mechanism and should offer them the opportunity to commercialize through the distribution of Actiblizz titles. Ubisoft will also have the opportunity to provide these games to cloud gaming services that aren’t operating on Windows.

This is an interesting move from Microsoft but if it goes well then that means we can finally stop hearing about this deal.