It seems that Microsoft’s move to put 2024’s Call of Duty on the subscription service at launch has had somewhat divisive results.

The Game Business has taken a look back at how Microsoft’s decision has played out, and the results are mixed. On the one hand, the decision seems to have paid off for Xbox overall. On the other hand, it seems to have done nothing for Call of Duty as a game. At launch, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 had 33.7 million players, according to player counts from Ampere Analysis. That’s a big 13 million increase over last year’s abysmal Modern Warfare 3, and a smaller but still significant 2.5 million increase over the last strong Call of Duty release, Modern Warfare 2 in 2022. Last year’s installment was a big boost to Game Pass subscriptions, with more people playing Call of Duty on Xbox devices and platforms, and while PlayStation’s market share still towers over Xbox, Call of Duty on Game Pass was able to keep Team Green in the race.

The surge in Game Pass subscribers brought on by Call of Duty definitely helped the service, with an 11% increase in the first quarter of 2025 compared to the first quarter of 2024, according to Circana. Gamers stayed to enjoy the rest of Game Pass, which is better for Microsoft and the Xbox ecosystem as a whole. The same gamers who joined Game Pass for Call of Duty seem to have stopped playing the franchise. With the release of Black Ops 6, the number of Call of Duty gamers on Xbox dropped by 10%, and the number of Call of Duty gamers dropped sharply after the release of the previous installments.

Call of Duty is still a huge game (with more than 20 million active players), but that player base is currently at 20.6 million, according to Ampere Analysis, slightly below the 20.8 million in 2023. The last major installment in the series had more players than Black Ops 6 at launch, and months later, Call of Duty has fewer active players than it did two years ago. The addition of Call of Duty to Game Pass has helped Xbox grow its subscriber base, but it hasn’t helped its flagship series grow in any meaningful way.

Call of Duty is an Xbox first-party title, so what’s good for Xbox is theoretically good for Call of Duty, but the franchise is arguably Xbox’s most important IP, and it’s not exactly a good sign for Xbox that expanding with it has only helped grow one thing…

Source: WCCFTech, The Game Business