Black Ops 6 is make-or-break for the Game Pass strategy | Opinion

gamesindustry.biz:

It's just over a year since Microsoft shattered industry records with its $75 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard – and next week, that eye-wateringly expensive deal will face its most important test yet.

The launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will be a major data point both for Microsoft itself, and for external observers, as they try to puzzle out the value of the deal and the kind of strategy we're likely to see from the company in the coming years. That's because Black Ops 6 will be available to Game Pass' premium tier subscribers at launch – a major coup for Game Pass, but one whose costs and benefits remain pretty much impossible to predict.

This launch is a landmark in the grand experiment that is Microsoft's integration of Activision Blizzard and its catalogue

It's not unfair to say that Call of Duty was the Activision IP that Microsoft was most desperate to acquire; it was this franchise that justified that extraordinary acquisition price tag, to the extent that it can be justified at all.

However, owning Call of Duty has actually left the company in an odd position, since it now owns a massive franchise that generates a very large slice of its revenues on PlayStation. Fears that Microsoft could make the franchise Xbox-exclusive were never realistic; even if the Xbox leadership wanted to do that, slashing the revenue potential of such an expensively acquired new subsidiary would never pass muster with Microsoft's top management.

Sony's big fear, and the reason it lobbied competition authorities to block the acquisition, was a little more nuanced; it feared that Call of Duty would be a Game Pass exclusive as a subscription title, tilting the competitive landscape by allowing Microsoft to point out that people paying $70 for the game on PlayStation could instead be playing it for 'free' on Game Pass.

That's exactly what has come to pass – and now it's time to run the experiment and test the theory. The performance of this launch, and in particular the