Why doesn't Xbox Game Pass include every Call of Duty game?

You see the clips make the rounds on social media every few months: futuristic soldiers, space battles, grappling hooks. The game depicted isn’t some hidden-gem sci-fi game waiting to be discovered. It’s Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, and despite wanting to play quite badly, I’ve abstained from buying it for the past several years. Wouldn’t you? Seriously, how many times have you been burned by buying a game only for it to hit Game Pass, or some other subscription service, immediately after?

When Microsoft announced its intention in 2022, to buy Activision Blizzard, many analysts surmised that Call of Duty was the reason Microsoft pursued the $68.7 billion acquisition. Microsoft for years had a standing policy of adding first-party games on Game Pass, and turning gaming’s biggest series into a first-party franchise would only drive subscribers to the growing service. Or at least that’s how the common thinking went. Microsoft announced Tuesday that, alongside a price decrease for Game Pass, new Call of Duty games won’t be added to the Game Pass library until roughly a year after release.

Look, as the rare person who plays Call of Duty for the campaigns, I’ve got no immediate stake in that. But if no new Call of Duty games will be immediately added to Game Pass, can we at least get all the older ones on there?

As of this writing, only six Call of Duty games are included in the Game Pass library:

WWII (2017)
Modern Warfare (2019)
Modern Warfare 2 (2022)
Modern Warfare 3 (2023)
Black Ops 6 (2024)
Black Ops 7 (2025)

That leaves 15 games currently missing from the Game Pass library, including some of the most beloved campaigns in the series. Infinite Warfare, released in 2016, featured space combat and starred Kit Harrington. Black Ops Cold War offered a playable brainless ’80s action movie during the dark days of 2020. And then, of course, there’s 2007’s Modern Warfare 4, whose famous “All Ghillied Up” level is a vehicle for one of the greatest gaming quotes ever: “Fifty thousand people used to live here. Now it’s a ghost town.”

You’re right, the easy solution here would be to just… buy the campaigns I’m interested in playing. Most of them are available on modern platforms, and are currently marked down. But I’ve been burned before. (In January, after holding out for years, I finally picked up Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 on PlayStation 5. Sony added the game to PlayStation Plus game catalog in February.) And at this point, with so many changes happening to Game Pass, maybe Microsoft will finally put the thing it paid billions of dollars for onto the service it appears desperate to drive subscribers toward. Right?

…Right?