Today, Xbox announced that its game subscription service, Game Pass Ultimate, is getting a price decrease. However, this good news comes with a side of bad news. Moving forward, new Call of Duty games will no longer be included day one with the plan, a big change for the service.
As of April 21, Game Pass Ultimate will no longer cost $30 a month. Instead, the price is being lowered to $23 a month. Xbox is also lowering PC Game Pass’s monthly fee from $16.50 to $14 a month. But there’s a big catch:
Beginning this year, future Call of Duty titles won’t join Game Pass Ultimate or PC Game Pass at launch. New Call of Duty games will be added to Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass during the following holiday season (about a year later), while existing Call of Duty titles already in the library will continue to be available.
Xbox claims that this change is a direct response to player feedback. The company has spent the last few years raising the price of Xbox Game Pass, and many blamed the day-one inclusion of new Call of Duty installments for the rapid price increase.
“Our players cover a wide breadth of geographies, preferences, and tastes, so while there isn’t a single model that’s best for everyone, this change responds to a lot of feedback we’ve gotten so far,” said Xbox in the price change announcement post. “We’ll continue to listen and learn.”
Xbox Game Pass’s previous price increases
The service first launched back in 2017 and cost $10 a month. It later saw a price jump to $15 a month when Xbox Live Gold was rolled into Game Pass to create Game Pass Ultimate, which also includes other perks like PC games and streaming. In October 2025, just a month before Black Ops 7′s launch, the service jumped again from $20 a month to $30.
Earlier this month, newly appointed Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma told staff in an internal memo that Game Pass was getting too expensive and needed to evolve.
“Game Pass is central to gaming value on Xbox. It’s also clear that the current model isn’t the final one,” Sharma wrote in that memo. “Short term, Game Pass has become too expensive for players, so we need a better value equation. Long term, we will evolve Game Pass into a more flexible service.”
It remains to be seen if day-one launches of other first-party Xbox or Activision games or franchises will also be removed from the service. For now, it’s just nice to see something in video games get cheaper. That’s rare these days.
