[STEAM] Microsoft Pulls $1 Game Pass Trial Ahead of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Launch — as It Did for Starfield

[Steam 0]

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has pulled its $1 for 14 days of Game Pass trial ahead of next week's

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release date.

Mirroring

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,

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has now made the $1 introductory offer unavailable. It was previously available only to those who hadn’t subscribed to Game Pass before.

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is clearly hoping to capitalize on

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, and it seems likely that hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people would have used the $1 offer to blast through the campaign and perhaps dip into Multiplayer and Zombies had it been available. IGN has asked

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for comment.

The Game Pass tiers that include the release of ****** Ops 6 are the $19.99 a month Game Pass Ultimate, or, if you’re on PC, the $11.99 a month PC Game Pass. The $14.99 a month Xbox Game Pass Standard tier does not include day-one releases, and so won’t include ****** Ops 6.

****** Ops 6 is the first Call of Duty game to launch day-one on Game Pass. It comes a year after

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’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which has also seen the likes of Diablo 4 and Modern Warfare 3 hit the subscription service, and will see StarCraft: Remastered and StarCraft 2: Campaign Collection arrive in November.

****** Ops 6’s launch straight into Game Pass is a big gamble for

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. It hopes the power of Call of Duty will boost subscriber numbers and revenue (itself bolstered by

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), but it comes with the risk of losing sales of the full-price game.

While Xbox executives have insisted sales can be boosted by a game’s presence on Game Pass, some publishers remain unconvinced. Former Activision boss Bobby Kotick, for example, was always against putting Call of Duty into subscription services. Unlike

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, console rival Sony does not release its new exclusives straight into its subscription service.

In

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last year, Xbox boss Phil Spencer was asked how he’d handle his and Kotick’s different ideologies after the deal to buy Activision Blizzard closed. "Well, there's a different person making the decisions," Spencer laughed.

In August this year,

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following its acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

“We run a business,” Spencer said. “It’s definitely true inside of

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the bar is high for us in terms of the delivery we have to give back to the company. Because we get a level of support from the company that’s just amazing and what we’re able to go do.”

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, with multiple studios falling by the wayside.

Wesley is the *** News Editor for IGN. Find him on

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at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at *****@*****.tld.

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