Microsoft closed its $70 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard near the end of 2023. Months later, Sea of Thieves and other Xbox exclusives were headed to PlayStation 5. The multiplatform shift was inextricably linked to the Halo maker’s massive overnight expansion into one of the biggest third-party publishers around. Now, as new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma signals more pain ahead as part of the platform’s latest “rest,” it’s impossible not to look at the outsized role Call of Duty might be playing in the calculus around upcoming mass layoffs.
2025 was a great year for new Xbox releases and Game Pass additions, but not in terms of the sales of many of those games or the growth of that subscription service. Despite a multiplatform launch, The Outer Worlds 2 didn’t sell enough to keep the franchise viable. The twin pillars of the Xbox business–software and services–both struggled, down 5 percent in the second quarter and another 5 percent in the third. Microsoft CFO Amy Hood blamed the most recent decline on a drop in Call of Duty sales between 2024’s Black Ops 6 and 2025’s Black Ops 7.
We already knew the most recent entry, up against stiff multiplayer competition with Arc Raiders and Battlefield 6, didn’t perform great at launch. It was the first entry in years not to arrive with a post-release weekend press release praising how much money it made, or even how many players had logged on. More recently, the game didn’t even chart in the top-10 best-selling games for the U.S. in April. In April 2025, Black Ops 6 was number seven. It was the fifth best-selling game year-to-date at the time. Black Ops 7 was only seventh in April 2026. That’s not a complete disaster by any stretch, but it puts into context Activision’s recent marketing push to reassure fans that this year’s Modern Warfare 4 is getting things back on track.
A report by Windows Central claims Microsoft had been relying on the profits from Activision Blizzard to help “subsidize” the rest of Xbox Game Studios. One bad year makes them extra vulnerable to increased accounting scrutiny and potential cuts. The fact that adding Call of Duty to Game Pass clearly backfired may have only compounded that potential issue. Microsoft raised the price of Game Pass to $30 to compensate for day-one inclusion of Black Ops 7. Not only did that entry not get tons of new players to sign up, it also spurred a dramatic uptick in subscriber churn across the program.
“We shed millions of subscribers over the span of a few months,” newly appointed Xbox chief strategist Matthew Ball recently said. To reverse the trend, new Call of Duty entries are no longer part of Game Pass at launch and the price has been reduced, though it’s still higher than it was a year ago. “Growth slowed down and subscriber loss accelerated after the pricing and SKU changes last year,” Sharma said in a memo to staff last month. “Since our price reduction we have seen acquisitions grow and retention improve, which is a good first step.”
We’ll have to wait and see how Modern Warfare 4 shakes out later this year. Will it be a return to form that beats Black Ops 7‘s fifth-place ranking in the U.S. last year, or another sequel that stumbles at a time of increased competition, including from Grand Theft Auto 6 in November? The void left by poor Call of Duty sales would be enough to swallow entire games from the smaller end of the Xbox portfolio. The ripples from its wake are like a sailboat being passed by a cruise liner. Call of Duty is too big to slip, let alone fail. What might be cannibalized in the race to prioritize and stabilize it?
“We are the fortunate stewards of industry-defining franchises that have enormous potential and player demand, but we have not adequately funded them to compete and win,” Sharma wrote in one of her bleaker memos to staff this week. “At the same time, as we saw this past weekend at Showcase, a reliable pipeline of first- and third-party exclusives and new IP are critical to our success. We need to reassess the balance between these and our investment priorities for the next 5 years.”
It will take a lot to balance Call of Duty.
