Xbox has confirmed it is reducing the price of its top-end Game Pass subscription and will no longer include new Call of Duty releases on day of release, following internal communication from Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma stating that the service had “become too expensive for players”. Sharma repeated the observation in a post on X anouncing the change.
In a blog post on Xbox Wire, the company said that Game Pass Ultimate would drop from $29.99 to $22.99 a month, while PC Game Pass reduces from $16.49 to $13.99 a month. New Call of Duty games will be added to Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass “during the following holiday season (about a year later),” the company said, while existing Call of Duty titles will remain in user libraries.
The cut does not fully reverse the 50% price increase the company enacted in October 2025, before which the service cost $19.99 on console and $11.99 on PC.
“Our players cover a wide breadth of geographies, preferences, and tastes, so while there isn’t a single model that’s best for everyone, this change responds to a lot of feedback we’ve gotten so far,” the blog post reads. “We’ll continue to listen and learn. “
The change means that Call of Duty buyers will pay very slightly less for a year of Game Pass Ultimate plus a copy of the game, with a total cost saving of $72 a year mostly offset by the $69.99 game cost. Microsoft added Call of Duty to Game Pass in 2024, and said that year’s Call of Duty Black Ops 6 broke records for subscriptions to the service. 2025’s Black Ops 7 did not fare as well, with analysts suggesting it had sold significantly less than its predecessor following lukewarm reviews; Microsoft said that it would stop releasing back-to-back versions of Black Ops and Modern Warfare as a result.
In the company’s most recent financial results, the company reported content and services revenues were down 5% year-on-year, which was attributed to performance of first-party content. The same results included a 32% YoY drop in hardware revenues.
In her recent message to staff, Sharma said the firm would “evolve Game Pass into a more flexible system, which will take time to test and learn around.”
Game Pass, which became a headline feature of the Xbox business under outgoing Xbox leader Phil Spencer, is widely perceived to be underperforming – the company stopped reporting subscriber numbers for it in 2022 – and has been repeatedly criticised and questioned by figures across the industry. The Call of Duty franchise is believed to be under particular scrutiny from Microsoft after Xbox spent a total of $75.4 billion on acquiring Activision Blizzard in 2022.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
