Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will make us understand if Xbox wants to be serious or not

70 billion dollars to become the largest multiplatform publisher on the market or to push sales of the Xbox Game Pass platform? There is now little doubt that Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 it will be a real watershed between the two possible approaches.

How the just announced new episode of the Activision series will be handled it will make us understand if Xbox wants to be serious or notand it all depends on a precise choice: will the game be available or not on Game Pass from day one, like all Microsoft first party games so far?

Deciding to exclude him to take advantage of the enormous revenues that the franchise produces every year would make sense from a commercial point of view, but would represent in many ways a sort of “betrayal” compared to what has always been the strategy of the Redmond company regarding the Game Pass.

Deciding to include it could do subscriptions are finally taking off to the service and make it truly sustainable, also in light of inevitable price increases; as well as pushing the sales of Xbox consoles, which have been victims of a worrying negative trend for months now, to the point that one wonders whether it still makes sense for Microsoft to produce hardware.

Heart vs. reason, Phil vs. Satya?

Over the years we have often had the feeling that the Xbox division failed to produce sufficient revenue to justify Microsoft’s commitment to the gaming sector, and in particular the current CEO Satya Nadella has recently expressed himself regarding the company’s approach to exclusives.

Many think that the Xbox’s recent opening to multiplatformwith the famous four first party games arriving on PlayStation and Nintendo Switch, is the result of a sort of internal showdown between two factions: one that wants to produce revenue regardless of everything, the other that wants to preserve the value of a platform which without exclusives would lose its identity.

Inevitably, the management that will be made of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and the next chapters of the series it will be a synthesis of these two opposing wills and will also impact future strategies; like the one rumored lately, which sees the new Xbox at the end of 2026 with Call of Duty among the launch games.

As we said at the beginning, It’s not long now and we’ll find out how things are: the Xbox Games Showcase will be broadcast on June 9th and on that stage we will finally be revealed the reason why Microsoft wanted to buy Activision Blizzard. How do you think things will go? Let’s talk about.