https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-03/xbox-s-game-pass-hike-shows-cost-of-lost-call-of-duty-sales?embedded-checkout=true

A former employee speaking with Bloomberg claims that Microsoft gave up $300 million in Call of Duty sales in 2024 through making the game available on its subscription service.

And there is the answer to why only ultimate subs have access to COD. I think PS made up 82% of sales of the last entry.

Well yeah but how much did they gain in subs, on PC they saw as an example a growth of 45% in subs. The price hike will not increase subs and I don't believe they will sell that much more COD games now.

as I wrote in the gamepass increase thread the big take away is this.

1) "Xbox gave up more than $300 million in sales of Call of Duty on console and PCs last year, according to one of the former employees, who asked not to be identified discussing internal estimates."

2) “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,” said Joost Van Dreunen, founder of the video-game analytics firm Aldora. 

3) "..while Game Pass “can claim a few victories with games that otherwise would have sunk beneath the waves (Human Fall Flat, e.g.), the majority of game adoption on [Game Pass] comes at the expense of retail revenue.”



We know they generated roughly $5bn in revenue last year on game pass.
What we are not told, is that something like $3bn is probably just shifted revenue lost from what they would have made selling games the normal way.
Then there is the cost of paying off 3rd party for games to come day1, and the off-set you need to pay for your own studios making games and giving them away for free on game pass.

The end result? while its likely profitable (we have been told so), its not enough for xbox and MS's liking.

This is why Call of Duty is no long on premium tier, and why Ultimate tier went up in price.

So a lot of game sales. It would be the equivalent of 4.3m lost $70 sales... If they got all $70 from a game sale.

After the cut to PS Store / Steam / Retailer is taken into account you need more than 4.3m to make $300m revenue.

It's no wonder that Ultimate and PC both got price hiked and the lower tiers won't even get CoD at a later date.

I wish they would have just announced they were going full third-party/publisher right away instead of this slow, drip-feed idea. They're not fooling anyone, and it's just drawing out the obvious. Better to pull the Band-Aid off all at once, imo.