This week, there’s new reporting from the Wall Street Journal that Microsoft plans to put this year’s Call of Duty, likely a new Black Ops installment, onto Xbox Game Pass. It would mark the single largest addition to the service since it launched, and a play to increase subscription numbers in a time where they are increasingly hard to find.
This will likely be announced officially at an upcoming Xbox Games Showcase that has its own Call of Duty section on June 9, in what used to be E3 time. But before then, well-sourced reporting seems to indicate that’s what’s happening.
This was always going to be the answer here, the only question was whether Call of Duty would be coming to Game Pass this year or next. Recent reports suggested there was some internal debate on whether or not to do this, but the pros ultimately must have outweighed the cons. Here are six reasons why it’s happening:
- Making a singular first-party exception for Game Pass, even if it’s Call of Duty, would no doubt rub existing loyal subscribers the wrong way, and break with its “all-in” commitment to Game Pass in an awkward way. If that can be an exception, what else would be in the future? And then Game Pass loses perceived value.
- It is indeed giving up a fair amount of Call of Duty sales, though the Xbox share of the market, namely due to its low install base, is likely something they are willing to sacrifice to make this happen. So it’s not as much of a cut as it could be, and there are certainly some Xbox players who will still buy it outright.
- A large amount of Call of Duty revenue now is post-launch microtransactions, not day-one game sales (though those are still huge, and COD is usually the best selling game of the year). Those microtransactions are not coming free with Game Pass, to be sure so it will continue to print money on Game Pass despite the base game being included. And Warzone has been “free” anyway.
- Microsoft has few ways to try to steal players from the PlayStation ecosystem with a relatively anemic first party lineup, and this is one of them. Even if during its court cases it swore it wouldn’t take COD exclusive to Xbox, and it is not doing that, the idea is that it can lure hardcore Call of Duty fans over to either Xbox consoles, or perhaps PC/cloud gaming if not.
- This is one of the last significant areas for game-based Xbox Game Pass growth. I cannot name another series outside of Grand Theft Auto coming to Game Pass that could make this much of a subscriber impact (and GTA 6 never, ever will). Starfield was the previous sign-up record holder, but I bet COD blows by that.
- It gives them an opportunity for a price hike. Without ways to keep growing subs exponentially with Game Pass, more price hikes are coming, and a high profile game like COD hitting the service is likely an excuse to raise prices, introduce more tiers, or both.
So, here we are. Again, I cannot see a way this wasn’t going to happen sooner or later. Whether it is the correct call and it does everything Microsoft is hoping it does remains to be seen, but the fact that it made this decision is far from a surprise, certainly.
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