In an interview with the Financial Times, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot talks about the recent deal that made Ubisoft the owner of the cloud streaming rights for Activision Blizzard. Guillemot said that the streaming deal will involve a “one-off payment” to Microsoft but did not disclose any details about the transaction. Guillemot also went on and talk about how he belives streaming will become a big thing in the video games industry and that it will revolutionize it the same way streaming revolutionized movies and TV.
“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.”
According to research group Omdia, cloud gaming services is estimated to bring in $3.2 billion in 2023, representing two percent of total consumer spending on games. Omdia believes that figure will at least double in the next five years.
“We strongly believe in the next five to 10 years, many games will be streamed and will also be produced in the cloud,” Guillemot said. “That’s what pushed us to go forward with the [Microsoft] deal.”
Guillemot believes that game streaming will be embraced in emerging markets where console gaming hasn’t made a major foothold due to the launch of increasingly powerful mobile technology.
“Countries that need to progress very quickly often jump to new technologies and skip old methods of the old systems,” he said. “So we think that [these regions] will move more quickly to streaming and the cloud than others.”