Ubisoft

Ubisoft Entertainment SA is a French publisher of Assassin's Creed, Rainbow Six, and other live-service games. It is not a console owner. It depends on Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, and its own Ubisoft Connect store.

When Microsoft restructured the Activision deal, cloud-streaming rights to Activision titles outside the European Economic Area were sold to Ubisoft for a long term. The point of the remedy was a buyer who would license those games to rival cloud services rather than keep them for Xbox. Ubisoft's independence is part of the remedy's logic.

Ubisoft Connect, the company's store and account system, is a milder platform. PC players sometimes must use it even when they bought the game elsewhere. That is a distribution tie on a smaller scale than Steam's, and it matters because a single-player purchase can still require Ubisoft's launcher and servers.

The publisher has had repeated takeover rumors. A sale to a console owner or to a larger publisher would reopen the foreclosure questions the Activision remedy tried to park at Ubisoft.

The Activision cloud-streaming license makes Ubisoft a structural piece of a merger remedy. If those rights are not licensed out evenhandedly, the remedy fails.

A mandatory launcher is a tie between the game and Ubisoft's account system.

Live-service shutdowns remove games people paid for when servers close. That is a consumer-lock-in fact more than a classic monopoly case.

Any sale of Ubisoft to Microsoft, Sony, or another publisher is a merger review with the cloud remedy in the background.

PC buyers can need a Ubisoft account even after paying Steam or a console store. The extra launcher is the friction.

Cloud-gaming services that were promised Activision titles depend on Ubisoft actually offering the license.