The rumours were true, and new Xbox head honcho Asha Sharma has moved faster than expected. Yes, the price of Xbox Game Pass has been reduced, but at a cost: Call of Duty is out.

Game Pass Ultimate – the tier which nets you all the Xbox first-party titles on day-1 – is going from $29.99 / £22.99 per month to $22.99 / £16.99. PC Game Pass is also getting a reduction, dropping from $16.49 to $13.99. I couldn’t see a UK pricing confirmation yet for Game Pass PC.

Asha Sharma previously admitted in an internal memo that Game Pass had become too expensive. In 2025, while the company was still under Phil Spencer, Game Pass prices rose an astounding 50%. This reduction does not bring the prices back down to what they were prior to that huge leap, but it’s still around a 23%-26% drop depending on region.

However, there is a tradeoff to this. According to Xbox, new Call of Duty titles will no longer launch straight onto Game Pass Ultimate and Game Pass PC, and will instead only be added to the service around a year later. Basically, just in time for that year’s Call of Duty to come out.

It was confirmed that all the Call of Duty titles already on Game Pass will remain there.

We don’t have official sales numbers to be able to confirm it, but it has been widely suspected that Call of Duty’s sales dropped heavily due to Game Pass, as evidenced by last year’s CoD struggling in the charts.

Last year’s big price hike was most likely to help compensate for the lost Call of Duty sales, but it meant Game Price was an expensive proposition for the average gamer, especially compared to other subscription services out there. This feels like an admission that the great Call of Duty Game Pass experiment has failed.