The 10-year agreement between Microsoft and Nvidia to make Xbox games available on GeForce Now has been made public.
Microsoft and NVIDIA announced a 10-year agreement in Brussels on Tuesday in order to deliver Xbox PC titles to the NVIDIA® GeForce NOW cloud gaming service, which has over 25 million subscribers worldwide.
This is the second deal in as many days after Microsoft has signed a 10-year deal with Nintendo. The deal will bring future Xbox games like Call Of Duty to Nintendo after the Microsoft, Activision deal goes through.
Microsoft reportedly offered the same deal to Sony which then rejected it.
Microsoft’s president Brad Smith tweeted about the deals saying: “ With today’s agreements with Nvidia and Nintendo, we will bring Call of Duty to 150 million new devices. That will serve consumers AND advance competition.”
Under the newly announced agreement, gamers will have the ability to stream Xbox PC games from GeForce NOW to various devices, including PCs, macOS, Chromebooks, and smartphones.
Moreover, following the completion of Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision, the deal will also make Activision Blizzard PC titles, such as Call of Duty, available for streaming on GeForce NOW.
Xbox’s Phil Spencer had this to say about the deal:
“Xbox remains committed to giving people more choice and finding ways to expand how people play. This partnership will help grow NVIDIA’s catalogue 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.”
The senior Vice president for GeForce at Nvidia Jeff Fisher also chimed in saying:
“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.”
Microsoft is making these deals in an effort to alleviate regulators’ worries that the Activision Blizzard merger may force games like Call of Duty off of rival platforms and make them Xbox exclusives.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been assured by Microsoft that Call of Duty will continue to be accessible on other platforms following the acquisition.
Nvidia reportedly voiced concerns to the US Federal Trade Commission in January about how Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard may limit competition.
They now appear to have reconsidered and are supporting Microsoft, maybe seeing the benefits of the company’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
A lot has happened since Microsoft announced its plans to acquire Activision Blizzard and this will definitely not be the last we hear of this story.