When Microsoft hoovered up Activision-Blizzard for a terrifying sum of money, one of the biggest reasons was to feed the ever-hungry Game Pass with the biggest yearly release in the world, Call of Duty. But now, Microsoft is apparently considering removing the series from the subsciption.

Let’s be clear: this is just a rumour, stemming from Jez Corden of Window’s Central. According to Corden, who was speaking on the latest episode of his pesonal podcast: “it’llinteresting to see… if they take Call of Duty out of Game Pass this year, which is a possibility from what I’ve heard,”

Corden doesn’t mention exactly where he heard this, but he has proven connections within the industry, so presumably his source is inside of Microsoft or Activision-Blizzard.

Now that you’ve got the main snippet, let’s talk about the context that it was brought up in. For a good chunk of the episode, Corden is discussing Game Pass, the rumours of new tiers being introduced and the possibility of Xbox’s new boss bringing the pricing back down.

He explains that Microsoft internally uses a “member weighted” style formula to charge Game Pass for first‑party engagement, so a giant title like Call of Duty “vacuums up” a lot of that internal revenue, leaving less budget to bring in new games that help prevent churn. He also notes that putting Call of Duty day one into Game Pass hurts traditional Call of Duty sales at the same time, so the franchise is effectively damaging both Game Pass economics and CoD’s own business model.

From there he pivots into the pricing/tier question and says Microsoft may need more flexible bundles or tiers, suggesting that some “big service games” could be pushed into a higher, “super tier” while most games sit on a cheaper plan. In that context he throws out the idea that if Call of Duty is such a problem for the business, Microsoft should let people “get rid of Call of Duty” from their bundle and that he personally doesn’t need it. That leads into the line we’re interested in a bit later about the series potentially leaving the service completely.

On the one hand, it’s a big step backwards considering Call of Duty on Game Pass was one of the big reasons behind the acquisition of Activision-Blizzard. On the other hand, if the series’ removal also brought the price back down, people would probably be pretty happy to see it go.

It would also mean yet another massive u-turn for Microsoft, which they’ve already done so many of that I’m getting fucking dizzy, my dudes.

Unfortunately, we don’t have any official Call of Duty sales numbers to really see how much of a decline the series has seen, but we do have anecedotal evidence suggesting sales have dipped quite badly.