Microsoft Cuts Game Pass Prices, Delays New Call of Duty Access

Microsoft did not just lower the monthly bill for Game Pass subscribers. It also changed what Call of Duty fans were buying, cutting prices while removing day-one access to future series entries. Game Pass Ultimate fell from $29.99 to $22.99 a month, and PC Game Pass dropped from $16.49 to $13.99, but the launch-day Call of Duty bargain is gone for new releases.

The biggest hit lands on subscribers who joined mainly for the annual CoD drop. Microsoft said future Call of Duty games will not arrive day one in Game Pass Ultimate or PC Game Pass. Instead, they will be added during the following holiday season, about a year later. Existing Call of Duty titles already in the library stay available, and Ultimate still includes current Call of Duty games, in-game benefits, online console multiplayer, unlimited Xbox Cloud Gaming, and other day-one releases. That means the service still works for players who want the broader catalog, but not for anyone treating Game Pass as a launch-day Call of Duty shortcut.

The move also rewrites the value story Microsoft built after it completed the Activision Blizzard acquisition on Oct. 13, 2023, following regulatory scrutiny from the European Commission and UK Competition and Markets Authority. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 became the key test case on Oct. 25, 2024, when it launched day one on Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass. Microsoft then restructured Game Pass in October 2025 into Essential, Premium, and Ultimate, with Ultimate rising to $29.99 a month. This new cut partially reverses that increase, but it also narrows one of the service’s biggest selling points. Microsoft said the changes respond to “a lot of feedback” from players, and the shift arrives as Xbox’s own site still markets Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass as offering day-one access to new releases generally.

For Call of Duty fans, the decision is now much clearer. If the subscription was mainly about playing the next annual release at launch, the best part of the deal is gone. If the draw is the wider library, cloud access, multiplayer, and the rest of Microsoft’s day-one lineup, the cheaper price softens the blow. But Call of Duty has been moved from the center of the subscription pitch to a later, premium-style upsell, and that changes the math for the series’ most committed players.