It looks like some more Call of Duty games might be making the leap to Xbox Game Pass, but likely only on PC.
In January 2023, Xbox announced its plans to purchase Activision Blizzard King for a total of $69 billion, the largest video game industry acquisition in history. After nearly a year of court proceedings and hearings around the world, Microsoft officially purchased the large publisher in October 2023. A year after the deal was finalized, a collection of Activision games has arrived on Game Pass, like the latest Call of Duty, Diablo IV, and Crash Bandicoot. But one big piece of the Activision’s back catalog that hasn’t been added to Game Pass is all the older Call of Duty games. However, that might be changing soon.
On December 9, as spotted by Twitter user Knoebel, Activision quietly added the PC versions of Call of Duty, Call of Duty United Offensive, Call of Duty 2, and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare to the Microsoft Store. You can tell these were just added as each game’s release date says December 9, 2024.
Currently, Microsoft doesn’t support Steam and Game Pass account linking, so it would make sense for Microsoft to add CoD and its expansion to its own storefront if it wanted to add them to the PC Game Pass subscription service in the future.
Originally released in 2003, Call of Duty (and its expansion United Offensive) were never released on consoles. So unless Activision paid a studio to port these classic shooters to console, I doubt they end up on Game Pass for Xbox. However, Modern Warfare, released in 2007, was available on Xbox 360 and is backward compatible on Xbox One and Series X/S consoles, so perhaps it will be added to both Xbox and PC Game Pass.
Of course, it’s also possible that these games were just added to the PC store because Microsoft wants to bring more of its back catalog to its own platform. We’ll just have to wait and see. The Game Awards are happening later this week, perhaps an announcement will happen there? At this point, only Phil Spencer and Geof Keighley know for sure.
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