Today Microsoft announced that Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will also launch immediately on Game Pass, its subscription service currently at the center of the debate regarding the Xbox ecosystem. For some, the addition of a similar game to the catalog from the first day of availability is considered a sign that the Redmond company still believes in it (after all, it has invested billions of dollars in it) and that it is willing to make what we can consider an investment huge to support it. So is it sustainable? Let’s think about it for a moment.
Asking whether Game Pass is sustainable or not doesn’t actually make much sense, at least not in these terms. Game Pass simply becomes sustainable when subscriber growth is in line with Microsoft’s estimates, while it becomes unsustainable when these numbers slow down or stop completely. Lately it seems that the scenario is the second, so it is legitimate to have some doubts, but it is not possible to determine an absolute principle of sustainability or unsustainability.
If you want, it’s a banality, but that’s how things are. Before launching the service Microsoft will have done its calculations, hoping that the offer would attract a certain number of people and that those people would steadily increase year after year, until they reached a certain quota, established within a more or less wide margin. The rest are discussions that take their time, such as the one on the decline in sales of the games included in the service, which do not concern so much the sustainability of the same, but precisely that of the games themselves.
A big investment
The launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 from day one on Game Pass can have many implications. One that is certainly positive for the service, because it can lead to sustained growth in subscribers, considering the attractiveness of the title. At the same time however, it will be an important testbecause if not even a new Call of Duty was able to give Game Pass the boost it has been looking for for years, then Microsoft could really rethink it in some way, even profoundly, further reducing investments in it.
As much as not everyone loves the Call of Duty series, it’s really difficult to think of a stronger game to give to subscribers, so I imagine that Microsoft expects important results, with feedback not so much from those who are already subscribers, but above all from who isn’t yet. I don’t want to give you the idea that it’s the last resort of the Game Pass, but a good part of its future will certainly be played out around the numbers of Call of Duty. Microsoft does not want to give up Game Pass without a fight, but in the event of failure it will remain disarmed, with Phil Spencer (the head of the company’s gaming division) and his team having lost a fundamental argument to defend its existence (at least in its current form).
This is an editorial written by a member of the editorial team and is not necessarily representative of the editorial line of Multiplayer.it.
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