Xbox Reportedly Lost $300 Million in Call of Duty Sales Last Year Due to Game Pass - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 04 October 2025 / 11,346 Views
Microsoft this week announced it is increasing the price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate by 50 percent to $30 per month.
A former employee has told Bloomberg that Xbox lost $300 million in sales of Call of Duty last year on Xbox consoles and PC due to the game now being available day one on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass. This is according to internal estimates.
"Game Pass hasn’t delivered the explosive growth Microsoft anticipated post-Activision, and they’ve realized their infrastructure costs don’t align with their pricing model," Joost Van Dreunen, founder of the video-game analytics firm Aldora.
Microsoft had hopes Xbox Game Pass would grow to the point of being the Netflix of gaming. However, that hasn't happened.
The service first launched at $10 per month in 2017 and a year later would offer new games at launch. As time went on the price increased and Microsoft would make day one games only available on the Ultimate and PC tiers.
Former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Kahn tried to block Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, however, the deal would eventually be approved. She took to social media and stated, "Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision has been followed by significant price hikes and layoffs, harming both gamers and developers."
She continued, "As we’ve seen across sectors, increasing market consolidation and increasing prices often go hand-in-hand. As dominant firms become too-big-to-care, they can make things worse for their customers without having to worry about the consequences."
The last known number of subscribers for Xbox Game Pass was 34 million in February 2024. Microsoft last July did announce Xbox Game Pass generated nearly $5 billion during the fiscal year ending June 30, 2025.
The changes to Xbox Game Pass on October 1 included Game Pass Core rebranded to Game Pass Essential and Game Pass Standard rebranded to Game Pass Premium.
Game Pass Essential and Game Pass Premium do offer more benefits than before at the same price, which includes PC games and cloud gaming, as well as in-game benefits that includes Riot Games. More games are also available now on both tiers.
However, one of the main reasons to subscribe to Xbox Game Pass is for day one games, which now cost $30 per month on the Ultimate tier and $16.50 on PC Game Pass.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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So this confirms it, all the people who were saying the ABK deal would cause GP prices increase were really right.
That, or there will have to be less valuable content available on Game Pass. If I had to bet, I think I would rather bet on your suggestion though.
GamePass would have risen in cost with or without a CoD deal. Every sub service rises in price as time goes on.
Jez should apologise to Lina Khan; she was 100% correct. The amount of tweets he posted towards her at the time of the court case was rather obscene.
Was not a fan of the news of MS’s purchase of ABK and so far they’ve done nothing to convince me it was actually good.
More feeling it was a major strategic blunder.
They will bail out completely by next year is my prediction.
To me, it never seemed like a move that could pay for itself in any reasonable amount of time - if ever - but I haven't done the math, so who knows. I'd be interested in hearing how long proper math, realistic growth potential included, predicts the time for the investment to pay for itself to be.
Regardless, from a consumer point of view, this much consolidation is usually a bad thing.
Its not like we didnt already knew that.
GP cant live and profits on its own
I actually believe GP can live with the profits it makes. The real problem is corporate greed and we're in an era where you better be increasing your stock value otherwise the work done is useless even if slightly profitable.
without ABK it probably would..... Its just the studios and upkeep costs are too high, for everything to go day1, at 20$ a month with the amount of subcriptions they have. Ei. Maybe if they had a ton more subs it would work out, or if the amount they spend on making games was lower. Perphaps drop 3rd party titles down abit for a while, until things balance out. They didn't, they choose to raise prices instead to keep 3rd party. Like what other options do you really have if you want to make back profits to offset the nearly $100bn spent on investments?
It can, as long as you controll yourself and the amount of Day1 content you put in there.
The subscription amounts, need to match the amount of investment you yourself put into making games, and then add day1 to it. It can work imo, its just MS is not balancing things correctly. The gamble they took on Call of Duty was huge... and obviously did not work out for them.
so to fix things, instead of increasing the price, they could say "certain titles don't come day1", and then limit the amount of 3rd party games they put in there. That could balance things out to make it work, but that then limits how fast subscriptions grow, as its perphaps less appealing to many.
Just go 3rd party already!! No one gonna miss you
wait did CoD lose money? or did they just "make" less than they predicted? because... that matters.
This makes it sound like CoD lost money? how is that even possible.
Figures. Really makes you wonder if Gamepass isnt xbox's future. If they just go back to making good exclusives like their competition, maybe more console sales and Gamepass subs would result
Xbox exclusives at this point feel unlikely as gradually all their first party IPs are going multiplat. Halo is the only big one left right now and that’s believed to only be a matter of time.
Timed exclusivity seems like all theyll do from now on.
"If they just go back to making good exclusives"
Well, I wonder how the recent cuts to the workforce will influence that going forward. But according to Satya Nadella the remaining staff just has to use more AI.
I fcken told you, they will lose sales numbers because they're so smart in putting new cods day one on GAMEPASS lol
Meanwhile Black Ops 6 Grosses $1b in 10 days
https://thesouthtexan.com/index.php/2024/11/14/review-black-ops-6-grosses-1-billion-in-10-days/
People really trying to find excuses for GP price hike.
They should have kept the old ultimate and remove cod from it and then charged the 30 bucks one with cod in it or better still not add cod into gamepass
