Microsoft might have purchased someone, maybe

Not necessarily. Star Wars games are available through EA Play (and some also through PC Gamepass, as you get the basic EA play sub with Gamepass). I just took a glance and the Pro tier actually includes non-EA Star Wars games going all the way back to Dark Forces and X-Wing. If they wanted to include Star Trek games on Gamepass, I'm sure they could.

I expect they aren't going to be that interested in sorting out a deal to do that for the Star Trek games though. As Bill says, there is also a lot of stuff there that will likely need a lot of faff to get working on modern systems, which I would expect them to not bother with.

Yeah, that list is a bizarre incomplete wishlist from someone with a thin grasp on reality.

We'll probably see any current gen games and previous gen that are already BC appear on game pass (with exceptions for anything with licensing issues), plus whatever is on battle.net will shift to the MS store at some point.
Anything more than that and I wouldn't hold my breath. We're not getting Diablo 1 FFS.

They’re quite tightly integrated with battlenet aren’t they? It won’t be a simple lift and shift to put them on the shitty MS service for sure.

We might get them, but probably not any time soon. I wonder if there might be a check the other way: attach the Xbox account to battlenet and it unlocks stuff if you have GP? Possibly.

Oh, my oops actually. It isn't on Battle.net. My copy is the GoG one.

Still, I'm sure they could include it on Gamepass if they wanted to (I expect Diablo 1-3 will be available within a few months of the merger being sorted, but 4 will be a year or so after).

As for the games being integrated with Battle.net, they could just require you to have both launchers installed. Not certain, but I expect there are already games on Gamepass that require another launcher. A more elegant solution might come along later.

They're only there because EA still has a licence to sell them. I think we know at this point what Activision cares about and what they don't care about and how much effort they're going to put into something.

I wasn't even thinking about Star Trek because I know Activision wouldn't even go there. I was thinking more Marvel and Bond stuff which are just dead abandonware now. Especially as Activision had the Marvel licence taken away from them because the quality was so bad.

I'd love it if they just did a Quake/GoldenEye style rerelease of Klingon Honour Guard and the Voyager games.

God, I hope so; that's one of the reasons I've been broadly positive about this deal.

Regarding them allegedly selling off the entire cloud game option to another company, that would indeed suck. There's no way I'm changing mobile or broadband provider just for cloud gaming, so it would effectively cut off a service that I already own, or incur additional charges if you wanted to keep it up.

I genuinely don't see how this is good for the consumer and further evidence that the CMA has botched this a little bit.

Yeah, it's fucked up. Bad move all round if that's how it ends up panning out.

Keep Acti games off cloud if you have to but don't lose the feature entirely.

I'd be alright if they partnered up for streaming services. Other peoples experiences may vary, but having pissed about with Ubisoft+ for a bit, their games run way better through Luna than anything I've run via xCloud. Mostly I just use to see if it's worth downloading a game. If I am really determined to have an inferior gaming experience, console streaming via the Xbox app is about the only way to have anything from Microsoft running at a playable level. Also until you can play any game you own digitally and not just their curated library then the service as a whole is mostly pointless.

Oh yeah, that's what the rumours say at the moment; that we're about to be dicked out of a service that will exist in almost every other Xbox market.

I don't even use cloud gaming all that much. It's next to useless for anything that requires speed and precision - Halo or Forza - but it's nice for turn-based games, puzzlers that don't require twitch reflexes (eg Peggle), or slow-paced adventures or 2D RPGs.

What it's BRILLIANT for, though, is just trying stuff out; it's like demoing a game before you install it. And so many of the Xbox rewards challenges are either "play game X" or something relatively simple like "get 50 points in game Y" that being able to stream the game rather than download it is a HUGE plus.

The fact that the UK might lose this existing service due to the CMA is really annoying.

TIL:

Smith said the cloud gaming market in the UK right now is "so small," adding that Microsoft's server network in the UK doesn't allow for more than 5,000 concurrent users.



Doesn't seem like a lot.

I thought the root issue here was, specifically, ActiBlizz properties (and, let's be honest, only really CoD) being on the cloud? They don't have to jettison the whole thing and all those thousands of other games if they don't want to.

Smacks of gamesmanship to make the CMA look silly.

Considering that’s Sony’s whole motivation, it makes sense. They’re ride or dying this whole stupid thing.