Microsoft’s GeForce Now Game Pass offering is aimed straight at UK regulators

Enlarge / Microsoft will offer Game Pass titles to Nvidia GeForce Now subscribers for streaming—a, shall we say, unique gaming setup to come. (credit: Microsoft)

There's a lot to unpack inside the game-streaming news from Microsoft's Xbox event over the weekend. The shortest, most context-free version of it is that some Game Pass games for PC will soon be available to stream through Nvidia's GeForce Now if you happen to subscribe to both services.

But most anyone following the company's quest to acquire Activision Blizzard, currently stalled by UK regulators, can see it as a transparent maneuver in Microsoft's continuing charm campaign. Microsoft's opening up of its PC Game Pass library to GeForce Now is predicated on countering the notion that its ownership of game studios, gaming hardware, and a cloud gaming/subscription service (let alone desktop gaming's most popular operating system) constitutes an unfair vertical monopoly, especially in cloud gaming.

Acquiring Activision Blizzard, the UK Competition and Markets Authority wrote in April, would result in "a substantial lessening of competition" in that country's cloud-gaming offerings, and Microsoft would likely "find it commercially beneficial to make Activision’s titles exclusive to its own cloud gaming service," the Authority wrote.

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