Rick Flair 
After a fiasco that was the sudden subscription price increase for the Game Pass Ultimate due to BO7's being added to it, it seems like Xbox, which owns Activision nowadays, realized that it wasn’t the move. Now, Call of Duty is going back to a full premium product, and the Game Pass Ultimate’s price has already dropped from $29.99 to $22.99 a month. CoD will not lose its potential sales, and Xbox users will get all the perks of an Ultimate subscription without having to pay an extra ⅓ of the price for the game they don’t play.
So, Why is It Good Again?
If you remember the drama that was happening around Black Ops 7 and Battlefield 6’s release, you remember how much the community hated BO7 as a redundant game that doesn’t bring anything new to the table and completely breaks the image of the series. All of this drama led to the worst Call of Duty release since 2008’s World at War. According to reports, CoD’s physical sales in the UK alone dropped by ~60% compared to BO6 sales.
As a response to the wave of hate, Xbox decided to go for the last resort and increased the Game Pass prices to mitigate the potential profit loss. Needless to say, it didn’t help the game in any way, and even more users who weren’t CoD fans started hating on it even more.
Now that new CoD entries aren’t coming to Game Pass, the price for the Ultimate subscription has been dropped significantly, which means more users will resubscribe to it, and Call of Duty will continue to break the bank with its new games, earning full profit. The quality, at least in theory, should improve, cause if you played Black Ops 7, you know that this game felt stale despite all the attempts of winning back the audience.
What Now?
Now that CoD returns as a game that you need to purchase to play, we can expect changes for the better. At least I hope so. Less MTX and awful skins, more quality gameplay. This year’s CoD is going to be Modern Warfare 4, according to the rumors, so I hope to see a quality leap compared to a cash grab that BO7 and MW3 were.
As for the Game Pass Ultimate, it’s now just $3 more than it was before the price increase, which, adjusted for inflation, is more or less the same price. The new Xbox head, Asha Sharma, is definitely taking steps in the right direction, so we can hope to see new exclusives, and who knows, maybe even previously canceled games will make a return, like Perfect Dark reimagination. In the end, this is a win-win situation for everyone, whether you’re a Call of Duty fan or an Xbox owner.
No Call of Duty in Game Pass Anymore?
Well, kinda. According to Xbox Studios' own words, the latest Call of Duty entries will be added to Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass a year later, the following holiday season. If you thought that the previous CoD entries would be removed from the Game Pass library, you can breathe easy. They are there to stay. This means that if you wanted to play Black Ops 7 but for some reason didn’t get it, now is the best time to give it a try. Don’t know about you, but that’s exactly what I’m going to do now.
