Call of Duty will come to Xbox Game Pass on day one

Xbox has had a pretty tumultuous few weeks, clearly having to think on its feet after a series of leaks about its long-term strategy.

As part of that push for public attention, the gaming giant has reaffirmed that owners of its hardware can expect to see one of the biggest franchises in the world hitting Game Pass soon.

Call of Duty was seen by many as being one of the core reasons behind Xbox’s slow acquisition of Activision Blizzard, after all, but none of the franchise’s titles have yet hit the all-important subscription service.

Since 2024’s COD game is still unannounced (a pretty normal situation for the annual release at this point in the year), we don’t know for sure whether it will be on Game Pass “Day One”, as Xbox calls it.

However, in a new interview with independent journalist Stephen Totilo, Phil Spencer has reiterated that COD on Game Pass is a matter of “when” not “if”.

Spencer told Totilo: “Our intent is the full portfolio of games from ZeniMax, Activision Blizzard and XGS – Xbox Game Studios – will be on Game Pass, day one”.

That doesn’t leave much room for ambiguity, so we’d be very surprised if this year’s COD didn’t hit the service at no extra cost.

When the back catalogue will arrive, meanwhile, isn’t as easy to guess. However, you would assume it wouldn’t take years for that plan to fall into line.

With many of the older COD games now working online again thanks to Xbox fixing its servers around a year ago, the nostalgic appeal of being able to play literally any COD game you fancy online like the old days using Game Pass would be quite something.

Xbox’s murky time continues, then, and this week also saw the aforementioned leaks prove accurate on quite a few counts. Successive announcements from the likes of Nintendo and other publishers have confirmed that previous console exclusives to Xbox are now coming to other platforms.

This sees the critically acclaimed adventure game Pentiment hit Switch today, while the likes of Hi-Fi Rush, Grounded and Sea of Thieves all have confirmed release dates on new platforms too.