Back in the middle of 2023, Microsoft was still in a difficult position in regards to acquiring Activision Blizzard. The UK Competition and Markets Authority had made it clear that changes needed to be made before they'd approve the deal going through, and one of those changes ended up being a surprise agreement with Ubisoft.
As part of the agreement, Ubisoft ended up buying the cloud streaming rights to Activision Blizzard console and PC titles for the next 15 years, allowing them to become available via the Ubisoft+ subscription service. This kinda went quiet for another two and a half years, but now the first four Activision games are finally available on Ubisoft+ Premium.
"The first Activision games are now available to stream on Ubisoft+ Premium, with more from Activision and Blizzard coming soon. These additions to Ubisoft's subscription platform are a result of the August 2023 announcement of Ubisoft's acquisition of the rights to stream Activision and Blizzard games. The first cloud integration is with NVIDIA GeForce NOW*, and these games will become available via Ubisoft+ Premium through more cloud providers in the future."
The first four games are as follows:
- Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
- Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy
- Spyro Reignited Trilogy
Back in September of 2023, Ubisoft's CEO explained that the company bought the rights because it felt cloud streaming would be a massive part of gaming going forward, and a press release yesterday highlighted how it can "further strengthen the Ubisoft+ content offering as well as license streaming access of this amazing catalog to cloud gaming companies, service providers and console makers".
It ended up working out amazingly well for Microsoft, of course — this specific deal with Ubisoft was highlighted by the UK CMA as a key reason why the Activision Blizzard takeover was approved, and everything was done and dusted by October of that year. If this hadn't happened, who knows what might have come of it!