Anyone paying attention would already have guessed that the recently announced Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 would be coming to Game Pass on release. However, this has never been officially confirmed by Microsoft, owners of both Xbox and CoD publishers Activision, until today, by accident.
It was The Verge’s Tom Warren who spotted this first, tweeting an image of the notification sent out to some mobile app users that excitedly declared, “Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is coming to Game Pass on day one later this year!”
This then linked to a dead page on Xbox Wire, but is highly suggestive that Microsoft was planning to make the announcement at some point later today (their penchant is for 10 a.m. ET declarations). Someone must have pressed a Bad Button. Someone’s in lots of trouble.
COD Blops 6 is getting its own show after the Xbox Games Showcase section of Summer Game Fest on June 9, in which we’ll likely see an awful lot of cutscenes and about 13 seconds of in-game footage (during which the player is essentially stuck in a cutscene, as this makes up 95 percent of all the series’ single-player campaigns). They may even announce a zombie mode! But it seems the plan is to let people know about the Game Pass inclusion a lot sooner. Just not this much sooner.
The big question, of course hasn’t been whether, but rather how much? Microsoft buying Activision was one of the most controversial events in all of gaming history, and it’d be a pretty redundant effort if the Xbox maker weren’t then able to flaunt access to the multi-billion dollar franchise on its own machine, while charging full-price for PlayStation players. However, doing so will inevitably take a massive chunk out of the game’s annual sales, so Microsoft has a balancing act to perform.
The rumor is that either Game Pass will see a shift in prices before November, or that yet another tier will be added to the already-confusing muddle, that will cost even more but secure access to a library of CoD games without paying $70 a piece. Game Pass Ultimate Deluxe, perhaps.
It’ll be very interesting to see if an announcement for Black Ops 6 on Game Pass does appear today, without any details of increased pricing—that could entice the large numbers of new subscribers Microsoft desperately needs right now, only to wildly piss everyone off with belated price hikes closer to the game’s launch. I mean, that’s me wildly speculating, but what I did was think to myself, “What would be the most Microsoft way to handle this?”
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