Call of Duty: Xbox Game Pass is available from day one for the new game

Microsoft has broken the rules of big video game launches by announcing its hotly anticipated new title – Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 – will be available immediately to subscribers of its Game Pass service.

Traditionally, players have had to hand over significant amounts of money up front to buy big news outright.

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

GamesIndustry.biz boss Christopher Dring told the BBC it was a “significant step” for Microsoft and the industry.

The tech giant has previously made games available to Game Pass subscribers on launch day — such as the anticipated Starfield in 2023 — but never with a release as big as Call of Duty.

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

But before sticking to the proven sales model, Microsoft is betting on a new approach.

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

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

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

They are extremely popular services, with Sony reporting that PlayStation Plus had 47 million subscribers as of March 2023, while Microsoft reported that 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 have a release date yet), none of the 34 million Game Pass subscribers will have to pay anything extra to play the new game.

That means Microsoft is taking a huge gamble, potentially cannibalizing sales in exchange for what it hopes is a spike in Game Pass subscribers.

Mr Dring said the move likely led to an inherent problem with game streaming services – people simply don’t play as many games as they watch TV shows, so “it can be hard to justify” paying to play one or two titles.

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

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

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

That’s because when Microsoft bought Activision, it had to make concessions to deal with the attention of regulators around the world.

To keep the deal in front of UK regulators in particular, Microsoft agreed to give French games publisher Ubisoft the rights to distribute Activision games on consoles and PCs.

This means that cloud streaming rights are decided by Ubisoft – so it may not be available for streaming at launch.

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

However, the specifics of the deal are unknown and it is highly unlikely that PlayStation players will be able to stream the game on its release day.