There's been another big acquisition-led showdown in the EU today, as Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo and other companies all meet to discuss Xbox's Activision Blizzard deal. One of those other companies is Nvidia, who've just agreed a deal with Microsoft relating to bringing Xbox games to the 'GeForce Now' streaming service.
Microsoft has entered into a 10-year agreement with Nvidia to bring Xbox's catalog of cloud streaming titles to GeForce Now. What's more, the deal is effective immediately, which means Xbox's current lineup will be available on the service right away.
This agreement also means that, if the Activision Blizzard deal goes through, Xbox will bring ActiBlizz titles over to Nvidia's service as well, at least for the agreed duration of 10 years. Here's what Xbox boss Phil Spencer had to say on the move:
"Xbox remains committed to giving people more choice and finding ways to expand how people play,
This partnership will help grow NVIDIA's catalog of titles to include games like Call of Duty, while giving developers more ways to offer streaming games. We are excited to offer gamers more ways to play the games they love."
Nvidia has also chimed in on the deal. As you can imagine, the company sounds pretty chuffed that its service is being bolstered by Xbox games in the here and now, and potentially Activision Blizzard titles in the near future. Here's a statement from senior vice president for GeForce at Nvidia, Jeff Fisher:
"Combining the incredibly rich catalog of Xbox first party games with GeForce NOW's high-performance streaming capabilities will propel cloud gaming into a mainstream offering that appeals to gamers at all levels of interest and experience,
Through this partnership, more of the world's most popular titles will now be available from the cloud with just a click, playable by millions more gamers."
Earlier today, Microsoft also entered into a same-length agreement with Nintendo. The Japanese company will host Call of Duty (and potentially many other titles) on its platform for 10 years, if the deal goes through, as Xbox commits to bringing more of its games to rival systems.
Do you see this as an important step for the Xbox ActiBlizz deal? Let us know your thoughts down below.
[source prnewswire.com]
Comments 20
Wow at this rate the only place cod won't be Is on PlayStation, thats it Sony u keep your ground saying it's for the gamers you'd doing it etc etc lmfao
At this point I just want see Microsoft purchase Activision simply to piss off Sony. I've never seen a company act like a child throwing temper tantrum as Sony has.
@GuyinPA75 the worst part for me is it's not about competition ,it's about the money Sony will lose when they won't have exclusive cod stuff ,if it was REALLY about keeping cod for the ps players a 10 year deal would be amazing for the ps cod players
MS ain't kidding around handing out decade long deals left and right... Jesus.
So now you can actually buy individual Xbox titles and stream them through the cloud, something you still can't do on Xbox. I wonder if that's something they're planning to add to their own store as well.
I'm loving the part from the press conference
Smith has produced an envelope containing the deal paperwork he hopes Sony will sign - but it hasn't yet. He's waiting with a pen, or with Microsoft Office to print it off for them.
@FoodForSammy they already said some time last year that they plan for ppl to stream Thier purchased Xbox games
https://www.ign.com/articles/xbox-cloud-stream-games-not-in-game-pass
This is all thanks to Sony....haha
@FoodForSammy They already said that they're going to be adding streaming for purchased games, or "starting with select purchased games". Not sure when they're doing it and what determines "select" games (maybe ones that have been on GP at some point?), but yes, they'll be adding it.
@Kaloudz GeForce Now is an unusual service. It's basically GP's streaming competitor, but while originally at launch it was a streamed library, it's actually something different now. It's actually a PC rental service. You just rent a PC in the cloud, just a blank desktop instance. You buy your own PC games from the supported library and install them like it's your own PC. You're allowed X amount of hours per day to play, with the premium tier giving the most hours, and equipped with a 4080 rig.
It sounds absurdly expensive, and it is, but when you look at the price of the GPUs in question ($1200, 1500 a pop?) and the frequency you'd have to buy a new one to stay up to date, it's a bargain.
It's a weird premium kind of service, but all the same they're sort of xclouds competitor. Luna is more direct.
@Kaloudz Yeah, if I were still a hardcore PC gamer, I'd seriously consider that service tbh. With the insane price of GPUs in the post-crypto world, high end GPUs are just really unaffordable for most. People are complaining about the price of a PS5+PSVR2, meanwhile high end PC GPUs cost more than that whole setup JUST FOR THE GRAPHICS CARD and not the rest of the machine!! GPU rentals through the cloud really start making sense at those proces. Unless you "no life" your games like, well, most of us, where there's not enough hours in the bundle
If you figure you don't have to worry about storage, patches, upgrading SSDs, upgrading GPUs, troubleshooting hardware, as long as your stream handles it you're solid for a fixed fee, it's a pretty nice service. Now with 100% more Xbox Studios.
@Kaloudz My first GPU was...IDK...1997? 98? It was $199 and I thought I was insane paying that. Prices creeped up. When I got out of PC gaming GPUs cost $400, and $550 for the good ones. I wasn't going to pay 550 for a video card, I bought $400 one, and then that died and I had to buy another $400 one. And then that died and I had to buy another $400 one. I bought a PS3 and a 360 and that was that. When I saw those >$1000 prices last year I was like "who keeps telling me PC gaming is reasonable??" Sure, PC gaming is reasonable if you just want to play pixel art sidescrollers and Stardew Valley...
Microsoft: "We care about all gamers enjoying games regardless of what platform" - buys one of the biggest companies up. Its hilarious and perhaps understandable the only drama is around CoD when in reality there are so many massive franchises that will go exclusive. Crash, Spyro, Tony Hawk, Diablo to name a few.
Sony: "We think this will be bad for gaming" - moneyhats Square and god knows who else to keep games away from other platforms.
Both companies being hypocrits and hiding behind CoD to do it as its mass appeal will detract anyone and everyone from the real underlying issue.
It is all getting just a little bit daft now.
Think this will be the end of Xbox once this deal goes through
I give it two more generations of Xbox consoles before there just a gamepass app.
Another nail in the coffin for Sony's agenda.
@Kaloudz I remember going to CompUSA and buying a Nvidia PCI graphics card for my basic Compaq Celeron PC so I could play some more sophisticated games on it. Then I later built a nice Windows XP gaming PC for about the same price that high-end graphics cards sell for today.
Honestly, the whole PC hardware scene has gotten so out of hand when it comes to expense that I have lost all interest in having a high-end gaming desktop, it's just not worth it, especially right now when we have two relatively new high-end game consoles available. That and as someone who has had gaming PC's for decades, I am all too well aware of how poorly PC's tend to age when compared to consoles. That said I have had a nice gaming laptop that I bought back in 2019, and it's still performing great and allows me to play pretty much everything I want to play on PC at high settings. I really don't see what I would even do with a new high-end PC these days for the most part, there is hardly anything that makes them worthwhile.
@Kaloudz if you're using Nvidia geforce to stream games you'd be able to just stream them using Xbox game pass it's pretty pointless lol
@JayJ yeah for years people have been telling me how cheap PC gaming is these days ....I really don't know what those people are smoking but I'm assuming they mean for indies running 1080p.
@BrilliantBill yeah cloud is good when it works flawlessly, it gets iffier when it doesn't. Then again after all the Nvidia cards that would overheat, bsod, hard reboot, blank screen freeze, or corrupt...... The Internet flakiness is still better than native pc gaming 😆
@Kaloudz lol before that first gpu was the time I found out my isa video card needed 1mb memory. Absurd! Memory on a video card!? I couldn't afford a diamond stealth, so a generic card to get Little Big adventure, twinsens Odyssey running it was! 😂
@Kaloudz Why else do you think they take pictures of their PC's to share on the internet with all those flashy rainbow colored lighting effects and windows showing off the components? The PC desktop scene seems to be about trying to flex on people as much as anything these days, just people trying to have bragging rights so they can show off how much money they spend on computer hardware all the time.
I find it even more ridiculous when they feel a need to buy a new high-end graphics card every time a new one gets released, only to make asinine statements about how they think consoles are a ripoff or stupid for some reason. It's like their graphics card costs twice as much as a Series X/PS5, and I know they aren't getting that money back selling a used old one on Ebay, as the crypto industry has made old used GPU's really undesirable (as nobody knows if they were ran 24/7 mining crypto) which would obviously make them very unreliable purchases.
It's like it's no wonder I lost interest in gaming desktops around the same time I lost interest in modifying cars and showing them off, they really are the same sort of thing.
@Kaloudz I don't think I could get into video game streaming unless they made some major overhauls to the internet infrastructure in my area, it's pretty hard to get any decent speeds around here. As for crypto, don't expect me to understand it either, personally I think it's a bunch of nonsense. I do know that they got all these "crypto farms" where they "mine" the stuff, and they are all apparently heavily reliant upon an incredible amount of high-end graphics cards running 24/7. From what I've heard that's really made the graphics card market crazy.
For gaming PC's I used to build them but that was a long time ago. Now a days I got a nice gaming laptop I bought about 4 years ago, and that has been serving my PC gaming needs very well. I don't even know what I would do with one of these latest and greatest desktops anyways, everything I play seems to work just fine on my laptop, and I am apparently mostly interested in older games anyways. Most new games I'm buying are on Series X or PS5.
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