Call of Duty: Xbox Game Pass launches on day one for a new game

Microsoft has shaken up the rules for major video game launches by announcing that its most anticipated new title – Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 – will be available straight away for subscribers to its Game Pass service.

Traditionally, players had to pay large sums of money upfront to purchase major new products directly.

With the latest edition of Call of Duty, they will now have the option to pay a much smaller monthly subscription.

Christopher Dring, director of GamesIndustry.biz, told the BBC it was an “important decision” for Microsoft and the industry.

The tech giant has made games available to Game Pass subscribers on launch day before – like 2023’s highly anticipated Starfield – but has never done so with a release as big as Call of Duty.

It is the fourth best-selling game series in history, surpassing 425 million sales in its lifetime – and earning tens of billions of dollars in the process.

But rather than sticking to the proven sales model, Microsoft is banking on a new approach.

“Call of Duty is by far the biggest game coming to a subscription service on release day,” Mr. Dring said.

“(This) is a big test for subscription, because if Call of Duty can’t shake things up in terms of subscriber numbers, nothing probably will,” he added.

Game Pass, like Sony’s rival PlayStation Plus service, lets console and PC gamers play hundreds of video games for a monthly subscription fee.

Both have been described as a “Netflix for gaming”, but with the caveat that players can download many of the available games to play on their own hardware – rather than streaming them to the cloud.

These are extremely popular services, with Sony saying PlayStation Plus had 47 million subscribers as of March 2023, while Microsoft said Game Pass had 34 million subscribers as of February 2024.

But that means that, unless something changes between now and the launch of Call of Duty (which doesn’t yet have a release date), none of Game Pass’ 34 million subscribers will have to pay what let it be more to play the new game.

This means Microsoft is taking a huge gamble, choosing to potentially cannibalize sales in exchange for – it hopes – a big increase in Game Pass subscribers.

Mr. Dring said the move was likely due to an inherent problem with game streaming services: People simply don’t play games as much as they watch TV shows, so “it can be difficult to justify ” to pay to play one or two titles.

But with the addition of such a big game to the service, he said changes could still be made to make the numbers work.

“It will be interesting to see if Xbox introduces higher tiers to Game Pass or other monetization techniques to alleviate this,” he said.

One thing that’s unclear about Microsoft’s announcement is whether players will be able to stream the new Call of Duty game or whether they’ll be forced to download it.

Indeed, when Microsoft bought Activision, it had to make concessions to attract the attention of regulators around the world.

In order to get the deal through to British regulators in particular, Microsoft agreed to give French games publisher Ubisoft the rights to distribute Activision games on consoles and PC.

This means that cloud streaming rights are decided by Ubisoft – so it may not be available to stream when it launches.

This also means that the new Call of Duty game could eventually appear on rival streaming platforms.

But the details of the deal are unknown and it is very unlikely that PlayStation players will be able to stream the game on release day.