Microsoft has seemingly removed the $1 Xbox Game Pass offer just in time for the Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 launch

1 week ago 7

Things aren’t looking good if you were hoping to play Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 on Xbox or PC for just $1 at launch. It seems as though Microsoft has removed the option to pick up a 14-day subscription for a reduced price just nine days away from the Black Ops 6 launch.

The news comes from a recent post to the X / Twitter account of Call of Duty blog CharlieIntel that claims the offer has vanished. I headed over to the Xbox Game Pass website and wasn’t able to find the deal anywhere, which would lend some extra credibility to this assertion.

Black Ops 6 is the next entry in the hugely popular Call of Duty franchise and is set to launch on October 25. It will be the first Call of Duty title to be added to the Xbox Game Pass service at launch following the completion of Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard acquisition last year.

It will be available to those with an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate or PC Game Pass subscription, which costs $19.99 / £14.99 and $11.99 / £9.99 per month respectively. Many players had planned to take advantage of the $1 subscription offer to get two weeks of access to the game for less.

Although it’s incredibly disappointing to see this option disappear just days away from release, I can’t say that it’s particularly surprising. Call of Duty games usually generate a huge amount of sales revenue over their launch periods. The idea of Microsoft sacrificing a large chunk of this by providing consumers with an almost unbelievably cheap way to try out the game seems a little silly in retrospect.

There’s currently no official word on whether the $1 Xbox Game Pass deal will return in the future, but I suspect that it will once Black Ops 6's launch period is out of the way. While the timing is enough to raise some eyebrows, it’s also worth noting that this is not the first time that the offer has disappeared so it might be due to something else entirely.