Ubisoft believes that video game streaming will eventually take off and when it does, it will happen very quickly. The company is riding on this video game streaming cloud after it recently agreed to acquire gaming rights outside the European Economic Area for all Activision Blizzard games released in the next 15 years. The agreement will only come into effect if Microsoft’s $69 billion deal goes through which is now all but signed off.
During an interview with Financial Times, Ubisoft’s CEO Yves Guillemot says the streaming deal is a one-off payment to Microsoft. He is adamant that in the next 10 years, video game streaming will be the way most gamers play their games.
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Guillemot also says that not only will video game streaming be a major thing but games will also be produced in the cloud. He expects the agreement with Microsoft to push all this forward for the industry.
The Ubisoft boss compared the game streaming topic to Netflix stating that when the company announced it would start streaming, its shares dropped and they were widely criticised. He says that in 2023, that is a completely different story.
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.We strongly believe in the next five to 10 years, many games will be streamed and will also be produced in the cloud. That’s what pushed us to go forward with the deal.”
Guillemot also says streaming will grow bigger in emerging markets where console gaming hasn’t established a major foothold. He says that mobile technology will allow for this growth.
“Countries that need to progress very quickly often jump to new technologies and skip old methods of the old systems. So we think that [these regions] will move more quickly to streaming and the cloud than others”
Of course, we also have the rise of mobile gaming technology. Apple has recently released its new iPhone 15 Pro which is capable of so-called “console-quality games”. The company is riding off the back of Resident Evil Village and Resident Evil 4 to showcase this tech when these games are released by the end of 2023. However, the asking price for these phones is a little steep for emerging markets to embrace.
Source: Financial Times
