Xbox games coming to Ukrainian cloud service Boosteroid – more deals to come

Microsoft is trying to ensure its acquisition of Activision Blizzard goes ahead, by bringing Call Of Duty to smaller cloud gaming services.

Although there are probably few that would bet on Microsoft not eventually being allowed to buy Activision Blizzard, the process of getting the legal go ahead remains a long and complex journey.

For Microsoft, the priority is to prove to investigators around the world that they would not be creating a monopoly and, while Sony remains sceptical of their concessions, they continue to bring Xbox games to more and more third party gaming services.

GeForce Now was the first and now Xbox games will be available on the less well known Boosteroid, including Call Of Duty if it becomes a first party Xbox game.

Just as with GeForce Now and Nintendo, and Sony if they ever say yes, the deal is for 10 years and will include games from Activision Blizzard (even if there’s currently a question mark over Diablo 4).

Microsoft described Boosteroid as the ‘largest global independent cloud gaming provider’, which means its not owned by a larger company like Nvidia or Google.

Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of it before, because neither have we. Although apparently they’re based in Ukraine and have 4 million subscribers.

There’s no timeline for when Boosteroid will get access to Xbox games, which only underlines that they’ve done this deal as quickly as possible, to try and shore up their acquisition arguments.

Microsoft has already said that more deals ‘will follow’, although there was no indication of who with.

President Brad Smith told The Wall Street Journal that, ‘If the only argument is that Microsoft is going to withhold Call Of Duty from other platforms, and we’ve now entered into contracts that are going to bring this to many more devices and many more platforms, that is a pretty hard case to make to a court.’

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