Xbox Game Pass Gets Cheaper, But Call of Duty Day-One Is Out
Microsoft is making a pretty big Xbox U-turn: Game Pass Ultimate is getting cheaper, but the service is losing one of its flashiest promises — new Call of Duty games on launch day.
According to The Verge, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate will drop from US$29.99 to US$22.99 per month. In Malaysian money, that is roughly going from around RM140-ish to about RM110-ish before any local pricing quirks, exchange rate changes, or taxes. Still not exactly cheap, bro, but definitely less painful than before.
The catch? Future Call of Duty titles will no longer launch day-one on Game Pass. Existing COD games already on the service are staying, but new entries will only be added later — Microsoft says around the following holiday season, which basically means about a year after release.
That is a massive shift because Call of Duty was supposed to be the big Game Pass power move. Microsoft spent US$68.7 billion buying Activision Blizzard, and one of the loudest arguments for that acquisition was that franchises like COD would make Game Pass too attractive to ignore.
For a while, Xbox really leaned into that strategy. Modern Warfare III arrived on Game Pass in 2024, almost a year after its original launch. Then Microsoft went harder with Black Ops 6 and Black Ops 7, putting them on Game Pass the same day they launched elsewhere.
On paper, it made sense: take one of gaming’s biggest annual franchises and use it to pull more people into your subscription ecosystem. In reality? It looks like the maths did not hit the way Microsoft hoped.
Game Pass has reportedly been hovering a little above 30 million users, and Microsoft has not shared fresh subscriber numbers since 2024. That silence says a lot. If COD had caused a massive subscription boom, Xbox would probably be shouting about it everywhere.
The bigger issue is that Call of Duty is already a money printer when sold normally. Putting new entries into Game Pass meant some players no longer needed to buy the full game. Bloomberg previously reported that Microsoft lost around US$300 million in COD sales because of Game Pass. For a franchise that reliably sells every year, that is not small change.
For Malaysian and SEA players, this change makes the subscription decision more straightforward but also less exciting. If you mainly subscribed to Game Pass Ultimate just to play the latest COD campaign and multiplayer without paying full price upfront, that value has taken a hit. You now either buy the game at launch like before, wait roughly a year, or skip the annual COD cycle until it lands on the service.
But if you use Game Pass for a wider library — indies, older Xbox titles, PC games, day-one non-COD releases — the lower price helps. A cheaper monthly fee matters a lot in SEA, where subscriptions compete with mobile data, streaming services, gacha spending, Steam sales, and the classic “wait for discount” lifestyle.
This also feels like the new Xbox leadership correcting course. After Phil Spencer’s retirement, Microsoft Gaming is now led by Asha Sharma, who has already acknowledged that Game Pass had become too expensive for players. Dropping the price while protecting Call of Duty’s traditional sales model suggests Xbox is trying to rebuild around more realistic business logic.
So yeah, Game Pass is cheaper. Good. But the dream of “every new COD included instantly” looks dead for now. For Xbox, this might be less about one franchise and more about admitting that not every blockbuster makes sense inside a subscription.
Source: The Verge Gaming
