What you need to know
- Call of Duty: Black Ops 6's director has been talking to the BBC about the game's launch on Xbox Game Pass.
- The game contributed to a record number of new Game Pass subscribers, with the service praised as an avenue to bring back players and those unsure about it.
- Season 1 of Black Ops 6 is set to launch on November 14 with new maps, Zombies content, and Warzone integration.
Xbox Game Pass is "another avenue to really get the game in the hands of players" says Miles Leslie, director at Treyarch, makers of the already phenomenally successful Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. That's not all he said in an interview with the BBC, though.
"What we've seen is it's allowed people that might have been on the fence, might have had some of that friction, might have been like, 'I haven't played in a while' to actually come back and try the game."
I can speak to this first hand, because it's exactly mirroring how I've come to play, and become obsessed with, Black Ops 6. I used to buy Call of Duty every year, right up until Black Ops 4. That was the last I truly enjoyed, with each year's beta after that turning me off from buying. But this year I didn't try the beta, because I knew Call of Duty was coming to Game Pass.
And here I am. By the sounds of it, I'm far from alone.
During Microsoft's most recent earnings report, CEO, Satya Nadella, declared Black Ops 6 the biggest day-one release of any game in Call of Duty history for players, as well as setting a record for the number of new Game Pass subscriptions. It's an absolute win across the board, and in all honesty, I think Game Pass finally has its killer title. The name that will drive subscriptions like no other.
It's a win for Call of Duty and Activision (made better by the fact this year's game is truly good), and it's a win for Game Pass. Microsoft is the one winning extra hard. Think of it this way...
If Game Pass is the on ramp because it's cheaper than spending $70 on a game you might not like, what happens next? If new subscribers genuinely enjoy the game and want to keep playing, they have a couple of options. They either buy a copy of the game and cancel Game Pass, or they keep subscribing, potentially putting more dollars into Microsoft's bank account than if they'd bought it in the first place.
Either way, Microsoft is eating well out of this.
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For Treyarch, the key now is to retain all of these players for the course of the next year. From the same interview:
"You never know until it's in the hands of millions of players how it's going to be received. It's come out and it's been really positive. Obviously there's things that we can improve, and we've got our finger on the pulse of the community so that we can hear those things and analyse them and really attack and fix them in the right ways."
The next step is Season 1 which drops on November 14, bringing a raft of additional content, including new maps, Warzone integration, a new Zombies location and more.
