When Microsoft signed their ten year deals with the cloud gaming companies, it seemed like those agreements were random and inexplicable. But as it turns out, Microsoft signed up all of cloud gaming’s major players.
At the very least, these are the sufficiently biggest cloud gaming companies to capture 50 % of the market in Europe. This was what Microsoft stated on paragraph 562, page 135 of the document.
“At the outset, the Notifying Party argued that its agreements with Nvidia, Boosteroid and Ubitus are sufficient to dismiss any concerns in cloud game streaming. This is because, taken together, the three services represent [40-50]% of the total cloud game streaming market in terms of MAU (together with the Notifying Party even [70-80]%), and they will all have access to Activision Blizzard games.”
So, let’s review each of these cloud gaming companies one by one.
Nvidia is primarily a PC hardware manufacturer, selling consumer GPUs, industry SOCs, data science APIs, and even artificial intelligence hardware and software. Nvidia’s cloud gaming GeForce Now service launched in 2013 and was initially tied to their consumer hardware product line, the Nvidia Shield tablet and Shield TV. While their Shield TV products have proven to be a popular high end Android based media player product, Nvidia has spun off GeForce Now to be its own standalone product, also playable on various platforms, including Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, and even Tizen and WebOS.
Ubitus has not been as well known as Nvidia until recently. You can see that they have a Nintendo listing as a publisher, for cloud games on the platform like Aliens: Fireteam Elite, The Forgotten City, and Edge of Eternity. In fact, they also provide the cloud gaming service for other Nintendo Switch games, such as Capcom’s Resident Evil Village for Nintendo Switch. And the truth is, this Taiwanese company is discreetly one of the global leaders in cloud virtualization and streaming. Up until now, they hadn’t been selling games to consumers directly, but were providing cloud gaming services for those other companies, like Capcom.
Finally, Boosteroid provides their own cloud gaming platform, with their own game library to compete with Steam and Epic Games Store, as much as other cloud gaming companies like Nvidia and Microsoft. It also happens to be a Ukrainian company, based in Kyiv.
As Microsoft has revealed, these three companies combined make up 40 to 50 % of Europe’s cloud gaming market. With Microsoft themselves, the four companies add up to 70 or 80 % of cloud gaming in Europe. So it should be clear that Microsoft’s strategy with their cloud gaming contracts was targeted to sway the EU. And that’s exactly what happened.
