It’s not possible because everyone and their mother told me otherwise.
Edit: And I know, Call of Duty is the hub app for playing Black Ops 7, Warzone and Black Ops 6 but still.
Not really a surprise, I have to imagine that many people who used to buy COD every year now just sub to Game Pass for a few months and save themselves a lot of money, I still think it was a mistake from a business perspective to put COD on Game Pass at launch, I mean as a business perspective from Microsoft’s perspective, as a consumer it’s good for me.
One thing that I really don’t envy companies for is navigating all the noise online. If you asked people terminally online about this stuff they’d say COD is the worst more tired game ever. But then here’s reality to slap us all with a wet fish 
.
I’ll honestly be curious to see how the new Game Pass Ultimate works out for Xbox. Again if you ask people online, they’d lament it for being too expensive and blame COD and Fortnite Crew, but then COD is THIS big and the same goes for Fortnite. Both are now also Xbox Play Anywhere titles. I guess Xbox did these numbers already. Fortnite + COD might be a serious draw for a LOT of gamers and if they only played those two games anyway, then Xbox is getting a LOT of money if they can just keep those gamers subscribed. Then for everyone else they push them down to Premium and push them to buy the games they want (or wait a year)? Eh, it’s been more than a week and it’s hard for me to hang on to outrage. Sure go ahead with it. I guess the market will ultimately decide if the pricing scheme works.
I mean the earnings reports post ABK have consistently shown content and services revenue (and overall gaming revenue) up year over year. Including from the first time Microsoft included ABK revenue (as in when they JUST added those numbers without putting any games in Game Pass) and the first time they made COD a day one game. They also bragged a lot about how well it did for them, and this was before the $30 price increase for ultimate (but after the $20 increase and dropping day one for lower tiers). I think COD on Game Pass is doing tremendously well for Microsoft. I will actually give Xbox kudos and say they managed to make ABK more profitable for them and their gaming business than just leaving ABK alone. That’s hard for an aquistion of this size. In fact, I’d be cynical and say Microsoft is seeing these numbers, crunching their data, and the reason we got the ultimate price increase is because they think they can make even more off COD on Game Pass (not because they’re losing money overall, because they aren’t just purely based on content and services YOY growth in their earnings report; they probably just think they aren’t maximizing the value of the world’s most popular game day one on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate). So I think business wise it does Microsoft well, and I guess if it’s also working for you as a consumer it’s win win? Idk if you’re factoring in the price increase though. You have to think you’re just one person. How many people bother canceling subscriptions? Especially if they’re happy to play COD all year long and they get other AAA day one game goodies? Plus even if people are canceling, that’s still a LOT of people buying Xbox Game Pass Ultimate or PC Game Pass for COD who 1) might not have interacted with Xbox otherwise (even if they don’t stay that’s still new touch points to reach potential consumers for the wider Xbox ecosystem) or who 2) weren’t planning to buy COD otherwise. Then there’s the majority of gamers who aren’t switching platforms and will continue to buy COD at full price on their platform of choice. Then there’s also gamers who are more interested in buying COD on their platform of choice BECAUSE COD has a larger playerbase through Game Pass.
All that is just to say I wouldn’t worry about it. There’s a lot of ways it benefits Microsoft as a business. And they’ve proven that it does. I imagine current internal conversations about squeezing out even more benefit.
Terminally online… I learned something today, wow. It explains why some people can get so angry for something that doesn’t impact them in the slightest.