- Analysts agree the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate price cut and the removal of Call of Duty titles as day-one offerings was “not suprising”
- Circana’s Mat Piscatella says the offering “did not lead to a significant increase in Xbox console sales or even subscriptions”
- Ampere Analysis’s Piers Harding-Rolls says, “Microsoft was leaving a substantial amount of revenue on the table through a loss in premium sales”
Industry analysts appear to agree that Microsoft‘s decision to slash the price of Xbox Game Pass and remove Call of Duty games as day-one launch titles was the right move.
Earlier this week, it was announced that Game Pass Ultimate will drop from $29.99 to $22.99 per month, while PC Game Pass will go from $16.49 to $13.99 a month.
In addition, new Call of Duty games will only be available “about a year” after their release, but recent titles like Black Ops 6 and Black Ops 7 will continue to be available to members.
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Now, several analysts have told GamesIndustry.biz that the move was inevitable because the offer of new, day-one Call of Duty games wasn’t driving console sales or subscriptions.
“It was clear from very early on in the Call of Duty on Game Pass experiment that it did not lead to a significant increase in Xbox console sales or even subscriptions,” said Circana’s Mat Piscatella. “So, this change is not surprising at all. A little overdue, perhaps. But not surprising.”
Ampere Analysis’s Piers Harding-Rolls agreed with Piscatella’s sentiment, saying, “the commercial reasoning for pursuing a subscription-first strategy for new releases the size of CoD has not been realised.”
“Its inclusion in Game Pass was hoped to turbo-charge the service, but these short-term intense boosts of subscribers taking advantage of cheaper access to one of the most popular premium games available have not been able to be sustained for the long term,” Harding-Rolls explained.
The analyst goes on to say that with Call of Duty games being a day-one offering, “Microsoft was leaving a substantial amount of revenue on the table through a loss in premium sales,” explaining that the data “never suggested” to him that their inclusion in Game Pass had “as big an impact on sales of the game.”
“I am certainly not convinced at all that the inclusion of Call of Duty on Game Pass on day 1 had any significant impact on sales of the game on, say, PlayStation platforms,” he said. “If future versions of Call of Duty deliver the experience its players want, then sales will thrive regardless of its inclusion or exclusion from Game Pass.”
Both Piscatella and Harding-Rolls agree that the Ultimate tier price cut will be beneficial in the long run, with the latter calling it a “balanced solution” for the broader playerbase.
“I think the price reduction should help subscriber numbers grow,” Piscatella said; however, he is doubtful it will lead to higher Game Pass spending in the short-term.
He continued, saying subscription spending has been a huge money maker for the market over the past two years, but says the subscription service’s original $29.99 monthly cost “was making the value part of that consumer calculation questionable.”
Despite the removal of Call of Duty games as day-one Game Pass releases, Harding-Rolls believes this won’t mean the end of day-one launch titles on the service and suggests it’s still a “legitimate new release strategy for select games and first-party releases will remain central to this approach.”
“However, it does open the door to a more flexible approach to release windowing of first-party new games more generally,” the analyst added. “As the industry has seen with the shift away from platform exclusivity, Microsoft is not averse to pivoting its strategy to deliver a better outcome for the company.”
The latest Game Pass changes come after Xbox CEO Asha Sharma admitted in a leaked memo that the service was “too expensive” for players.
The Verge reported that Call of Duty and the release of Black Ops 7 were among the main contributors to Microsoft increasing the price of Game Pass in October 2025.
While Xbox Game Pass is now cheaper, the prices are still higher than last year, before Microsoft hiked the cost across all subscription tiers. Before the price increase, Ultimate cost $19.99 per month.
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