Game Pass price hike means you’re buying Call of Duty whether you’ll play or not

OPINION: Call of Duty coming to Game Pass. Game Pass now costs more money. Even if subscribers don’t want to play it, they’ll still be paying for it.

So, there it is. As night follows day, Microsoft’s announcement it’ll offer Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 as a Day One game for Game Pass subscribers was followed by the announcement of a price increase.

So, if you thought you were finally about to get your reward for an absolute dearth of top-quality games from Microsoft throughout the Xbox Series S/X era, think again.

Due to this increase, which is absolutely and totally attributable to Call of Duty (because, seriously, what else?) the subscription will cost you an extra £2/$3 a month on top of your current outlay.

The new pricing for Game Pass Ultimate is £14.99/$19.99, up from £12.99/$16.99. So this isn’t the win for Xbox gamers it might have been.

Make no mistake, whether you play this game or not, if you have an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription you are going to be paying an extra £24 or $36 a year just for Call of Duty.

Even if you feel like first person shooters are the lamest, most basic, stale, resting-on-its-former-glories genre in gaming (I’d personally ascribe to that sentiment), you’ll be paying for Call of Duty this year and in the years to come if you maintain a subscription.

Microsoft, of course, will continue to pick up $70 per game sale from non-subscribers and PS5 users too. So, it stands to be the most profitable Call of Duty game ever. And, unless there’s been some big changes in the last 12 months, probably one of the least consequential Call of Duty games ever. Talk about a law of diminishing returns!

That, it seems, is Microsoft’s calculation. The £70/$70 in revenue it would have made from Black Ops 6 sales for Xbox, will be more than accounted for by the extra £2/$3 it gets from every single Xbox Game Pass subscriber with the Ultimate tier. There are currently 34 million Xbox Game Pass subsrcibers across the globe, across the various tiers. It’s not clear how many of those are Ultimate subscribers, but we’re talking about an extra few quid a month from tens of millions of people.

Revenue over value

And you had to expect this. Microsoft paid about $69 billion for Activision Blizzard, mainly to acquire Call of Duty. It didn’t do this to finally add value for long-suffering Game Pass subscribers who’ve been let down for the entire generation and not received sufficient value in the form of critically acclaimed new day-one releases. No, it expects a return on the investment.

Microsoft is also tightening-up the tier you need to access Day One games too. If you’re on non-Ultimate version of the Game Pass tier you won’t be able to access Day One releases.

That’s because Game Pass Console (currently £9.99/$10.99) is going away, to be replaced by a new Game pass Standard tier which is £10.99/$14.99 and won’t offer the same benefits.

“Xbox Game Pass Standard includes hundreds of high-quality games, online console multiplayer, and select member deals and discounts,” Microsoft says, but that’s a pretty crappy deal considering you used to be able to enjoy Day One games for less money.

What you won’t get is: “day one titles, specific entries to the Game Pass Ultimate library, access to EA Play, Xbox Cloud Gaming, Perks, Quests, and discounts on games in the Game Pass library.”

If you’re a current Game Pass for Console subscriber, you’ll get to keep your tier and your benefits, for now. Inevitably, that will go away. It always does in these instances.

So, thanks for nothing, Microsoft! What could have been a reward for gamers who’ve stuck with the company through two straight generational hammerings from PlayStation, is now something they have to fork out more money for. Poor form.