Call of Duty lost $300 million in sales last year due to Game Pass

Microsoft's choice to put Call of Duty on Xbox Game Pass has come at a detriment in potential sales.

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It was always expected that Call of Duty would sell less copies once it was put on the Xbox Game Pass subscription service, but it was always hard to make an estimate of impact. Now reports indicate that Microsoft could have lost up to $300 million in Call of Duty game sales on console and PC in 2024 by including the franchise in Game Pass, most of which would likely be weighted by Black Ops 6's launch onto the service.

Sources tell Bloomberg's Cecilia D'Anastasio that Call of Duty made $300 million less in 2024 than it did with 2023, potentially indicating that Black Ops 6 was not as successful as the Xbox division hoped it'd be. To be clear, that's a substantial sum for any video game, and the potential lost sales represents 1/3rd of Modern Warfare II's astronomical $1 billion sales that the game made at release.

• Read more: Black Ops 6 on Game Pass may not have significantly cannibalized sales after all

Microsoft touted Black Ops 6's launch, saying that it was the "biggest Call of Duty release ever," also confirming a record number of users had signed up to Game Pass on release.

Black Ops 6 also did well on Steam and PlayStation, at least when it launched: "Unit sales on PlayStation and Steam were also up over 60% year-over-year," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had said at the time.

Activision confirmed that Black Ops 6 had "the biggest Call of Duty 3-day opening weekend ever," and that the game was #1 in total players, hours played, and total matches.

It was also briefly claimed that Black Ops 6 was the highest-grossing Call of Duty ever, but that was from an Activision engineer's LinkedIn profile, and the info was quickly scrubbed after we reported on it.

It's possible that Black Ops 6's explosive launch fizzled out, at least in terms of game sales.

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Historical sales performance of past Call of Duty games.

Any kind of underperformance, especially in a billion-dollar franchise like Call of Duty, may be a key reason why Microsoft is raising Xbox Game Pass Ultimate to $30 a month--a 50% increase, and the second price hike for the service this year.

Potentially lower sales is common for games on Xbox Game Pass, which allows players to buy a lower-cost monthly subscription instead of paying full price for a game. This replacive effect, referred to as "cannibalization," is the biggest controversy around Game Pass. Last year, gamers could pay $20 to access Black Ops 6 on Xbox and PC instead of the full retail price of $70.

This trade-off has been calculated in Microsoft's financial plans, but it's possible that Call of Duty isn't living up to expectations, triggering cost adjustments like price hikes as Xbox pushes to better profit margins.

Tying Call of Duty to Game Pass was the lynchpin of Microsoft's $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision, but that was before the global economy was wracked by months of disruptive tariffs--these costs have trickled down to consumers across all industries, especially the interactive entertainment industry, which depends on a multitude of specialized chips and equipment.