Microsoft’s gaming subscription service Xbox Game Pass will be coming down in price from today, but future Call of Duty titles will no longer be available on the service at launch. Other games from Microsoft-owned studios will still be playable on Game Pass from the day of their release, and older Call of Duty games will remain available, the company has clarified.

Last October, Microsoft increased the price of its top-tier Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription by almost 50%. From today the price will reduce from £22.99/month to £16.99/month in the UK, and from $29.99 to $22.99 a month in the US. PC Game Pass will also drop from $16.49 to $13.99/£13.49 to £10.99 a month.

Microsoft acquired the developer of the blockbuster Call of Duty series, Activision, in 2023 in a $68.7bn deal, and 2024’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 was the first game in the series to launch on Game Pass. A Bloomberg report citing a former Xbox employee estimated that Microsoft lost $300m in sales as a result of making Call of Duty part of its all-you-can-play service. Forthcoming Call of Duty games will now retail at full price (usually £70/$80), and will arrive on Game Pass around a year after launch.

Microsoft Gaming boss Asha Sharma announced the changes on X. On 13 April, she sent a memo to Xbox staff stating that Game Pass was getting too expensive, as reported by The Verge.

Game Pass has been at the heart of Xbox’s strategy for the last nine years, as Microsoft has tried to move away from the console hardware business (in which it has trailed rivals Sony and Nintendo since the troubled launch of the Xbox One in 2013) and towards a Netflix-style streaming model that puts its games on more devices. Since 2024, it has been releasing Microsoft Studios games on PlayStation and Nintendo Switch as well as its own Xbox hardware. Microsoft has spent more than $86bn acquiring game developers since 2014, beginning with a $2.5bn deal for Minecraft developer Mojang.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella claimed in a conference call that Game Pass brought in nearly $5bn in the 2025 financial year; former Xbox chief Sarah Bond claimed that it is a profitable business for both Microsoft and the other developers who put their games on the platform.