Not solely did Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6’s launch on Xbox Game Pass do little to spice up the service, however the sequence has much less gamers than final yr.
While Microsoft’s buy of Activision Blizzard didn’t end in Call Of Duty going Xbox-only, it was nonetheless a large boon to the corporate; one which’s cemented it because the world’s largest online game writer.
Aside from attending to reap the advantages of Call Of Duty’s gross sales on PlayStation, Microsoft can now add the video games to its Xbox Game Pass service. As such, final yr’s entry, Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6, turned a day one Game Pass title, in a transparent ploy to spice up subscription numbers.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, this technique doesn’t appear to have labored, at the least to not the diploma the corporate should have hoped. Financial outcomes from January confirmed Black Ops 6 generated solely a 2% increase in Game Pass subscriptions, which coincided with Call Of Duty basically persevering with to haemorrhage gamers.
This is based on information from analytics agency Ampere, supplied to The Game Business, which states that the outcomes of Black Ops 6’s Game Pass launch have been initially optimistic.
33.7 million individuals have been taking part in Call Of Duty final November, within the wake of Black Ops 6’s launch, which was 13 million greater than the variety of gamers from the yr earlier than.
This can partially be attributed to 2023’s Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 being an unusually unpopular entry within the sequence, with the story marketing campaign extensively believed to be repurposed DLC, however Black Ops 6 additionally improved on the 31.4 million gamers of 2022’s Modern Warfare 2.
Since then, Call Of Duty’s total participant depend has declined, with Ampere reporting 20.6 million gamers as of March 2025. By comparability, the place have been 20.8 million gamers in March 2024 and 22.4 million gamers in March 2023.
Basically, whereas Call Of Duty remains to be enormous, gamers are slowly drifting away.
Even if some video games would kill to have greater than 20 million gamers, Microsoft and Activision most likely aren’t thrilled to see participant numbers declining with every passing yr. Especially when Black Ops 6 is likely one of the higher video games within the sequence and a gross sales success.
That stated, these numbers are from earlier than a big April replace for Call Of Duty: Warzone introduced again the sport’s unique Verdansk map, one thing that was a lot demanded by gamers and sparked a noticeable bounce in participant depend.
Game Pass has additionally loved some progress prior to now few months, with spending having gone up by 11% within the first quarter of 2025 (January to March) in comparison with the identical time in 2024.
However, it’s unclear how a lot of this, if any, may be attributed to Call Of Duty’s presence on the service. Considering Black Ops got here out in November final yr, it’s extra possible that Game Pass’ bump was because of newer additions to the service, be they Microsoft revealed video games like Avowed or third celebration titles like Atomfall.
It’ll be fascinating to see how this yr’s Call Of Duty fares, assuming it too is a day one Game Pass title. No official particulars have been shared but, however rumours counsel it’s yet one more Black Ops sport.
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