With Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard now complete, the company has big plans to make the library of Xbox Game Pass games accessible to as many players as it can. Xbox CFO Tim Stuart says that the aim is to have the subscription service on “every screen that can play games,” which includes the company’s rivals, PlayStation and Nintendo.When speaking during the Wells Fargo TMT Summit (thanks, Gamespot), Stuart said that first-party games, advertising, and Xbox Game Pass are “high profit” businesses for Microsoft, which the company plans to expand in the future. The acquisition of Activision Blizzard is expected to accelerate Microsoft’s plans, as games like Candy Crush are advertisement-heavy apps.While it seems like a bit of a long shot, part of the company’s plans includes expanding the reach of Xbox Game Pass, and Microsoft has eyes on its competitors to host the service. “It’s a bit of a change of strategy. Not announcing anything broadly here, but our mission is to bring our first-party experiences [and] our subscription services to every screen that can play games,” Stuart said. “That means smart TVs, that means mobile devices, that means what we would have thought of as competitors in the past like PlayStation and Nintendo.”Microsoft has made a number of deals in the past to get Xbox Game Pass and its Xbox Cloud Gaming libraries on other services, including Samsung TVs, Nvidia GeForce now, Steam, and more. Getting Sony and Nintendo to consent to hosting the Xbox service is an ambitious plan, however, so it will be interesting to see if Microsoft manages to pull off such a scheme. As for Xbox Game Pass news, both Remnant games have just shadow-dropped into the service, and while Microsoft now owns Activision Blizzard, we won’t see their games drop into Xbox Game Pass until 2024 at the least.
Source link
