Past Call of Duty titles are continuing to crop up on the Microsoft Store and the Xbox for PC app, but they're not yet available to subscribers of Xbox Game Pass.
Call of Duty: Ghosts, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Call of Duty: WWII, and Call of Duty: Black Ops III are now all available on the Microsoft Store. This follows the recent release of Call of Duty + United Offensive, Call of Duty 2, and Call of Duty: 4 Modern Warfare to the storefront just a week ago.
If you plan to pick up any of these legacy Call of Duty titles for Windows without waiting for their inclusion in Game Pass, you are free to purchase them outright. However, they are all currently tagged with a full price of $60 each for standard editions. These titles were released during the paid DLC era of Call of Duty. So, if you want the DLC content, then you will need to pay even more for the upgraded editions, which can cost as much as $120 each.
The Windows editions of these legacy Call of Duty titles do not utilize Microsoft's Xbox Play Anywhere program, either. If you own them on Xbox, you will need to purchase them again (or wait for them to join PC Game Pass) before you dive back in for a hit of nostalgia on a Windows device. If you fancy yourself a fan of achievement collecting, however, the lack of Play Anywhere support does have the benefit of offering stackable achievement lists for each title.
The wait for COD on Game Pass continues
Microsoft closed its acquisition of Activision Blizzard King in 2023, but adding the Activision catalog to Xbox Game Pass has been a slow process.
This is partly due to the legal hurdles presented by regulatory bodies during the merger, which prevented teams from Xbox and Activision from working together until the deal was approved. As a result, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2023) was the only COD title to find its way to the Xbox Game Pass library until the day one launch of this year's Black Ops 6 on Oct. 25, 2024.
Xbox has not announced when legacy Call of Duty titles will finally make their way to the Game Pass service, but porting these titles to Windows is a good indicator that an announcement is on the horizon. Similar events unfolded in the lead-up to the inclusion of Spyro Reignited Trilogy on Game Pass, wherein the game was spotted with a fresh new PC port to the Microsoft Store before an official announcement. However, Raven Software's Singularity received a Microsoft Store listing several months ago and has still yet to officially join Game Pass. So, there does not appear to be a set timeline for how long following a port it can take before a game is added.
There are clear indicators from the community that Classic Call of Duty titles still hold interest. Previous Call of Duty titles saw a boon in player numbers during the summer of 2023 due to efforts to improve the servers in these older games. Black Ops 3's Zombies mode has also been a point of interest in recent months. Xbox has a limited window of when it could possibly announce the launch of classic COD titles to Game Pass, as the inclusion of the older games could potentially draw players away from the recently released Black Ops 6. Waiting too long for the announcement could also potentially spoil a reveal for the 2025 Call of Duty title during an Xbox Summer Showcase.
