Activision Blizzard Signed $160M Deal with YouTube Gaming for Call of Duty League Exclusivity

In a new report from The Esports Observer, it's revealed that Activision Blizzard has signed a $160,000,000 deal with YouTube Gaming to obtain exclusive streaming rights for the Call of Duty League among other esports titles, such as Overwatch and Hearthstone.

Prior to the Call of Duty League Launch Weekend in Minnesota, Activision Blizzard announced that YouTube Gaming would be the exclusive streaming platform for the Call of Duty League.

Sources said the deal comes in around $160M total for all of the esports properties involved — Call of Duty, Overwatch, and Hearthstone. The previous deal that Activision Blizzard had for just the Overwatch League (OWL) was reportedly valued at $90M total over two years. Activision Blizzard declined comment.

The exact breakdown of how much each property contributes to the total payout from Google is not known, but sources said that the majority is towards OWL, with a lesser but still notable amount going toward CDL...

Included in this deal was the announcement that Activision Blizzard will be exclusively using the Google Cloud Platform for game hosting infrastructure. Players have yet to see the effects of this change come to fruition as it will likely take some time to migrate existing services to the new platform.

It has yet to be announced if this will have any effect on currently released titles, which are primarily utilizing the Amazon Web Services platform, or if Google's platform will only be used going forward.

Activision Blizzard provided the following statement regarding their decision to utilize Google's Infrastructure...

We’ve worked closely with Activision Blizzard for the past few years across mobile titles to boost its analytics capabilities and overall player experience,” said Sunil Rayan, Head of Gaming, Google Cloud. “We are excited to now expand our relationship and help power one of the largest and most renowned game developers in the world.

We'll keep you updated as this relationship evolves.