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Activision and Sony have a marketing deal that prevents Microsoft from putting the Call of Duty series on their popular subscription service Xbox Game Pass at least until January 2025. This means that even if Microsoft closed the acquisition of Activision Blizzard in the coming weeks, the Call of Duty franchise will not be added to Xbox Game Pass.
This has been confirmed by Microsoft at yesterday's FTC v Microsoft court hearing. The marketing deal between Sony and Activision was signed before Microsoft announced their intention to buy Activision Blizzard King and Microsoft have been pretty clear that they will honour all pre-existing contracts, including the one that prevents them to put Call of Duty on Game Pass.
Now, it's not clear if this includes only new Call of Duty games or the entire catalogue. If we had to guess, the deal probably only focuses on newly released titles and not old ones like Call of Duty Black Ops or the original Call of Duty Modern Warfare.
The deal that blocks Call of Duty on Game Pass certainly won't come as a surprise to anyone who closely follows the gaming industry. New Call of Duty games are almost exclusively marketed along with PlayStation consoles and even have PlayStation-exclusive content like game modes, special benefits and early beta access.
Sony's deal with Capcom for Resident Evil Village revealed that Sony do indeed add a clause to prevent any Game Pass deals for a lengthy period and even demand performance parity, meaning that the game can't look or play better on the Xbox consoles.
This is certainly nothing new as Sony have been doing similar deals for decades and Microsoft too have their own partnerships that have similar clauses. It's just how the gaming industry works nowadays.
Xbox fans would surely be ecstatic to get such a massive title like Call of Duty on Game Pass but it remains to be seen if Microsoft can close the merger with Activision Blizzard King anytime soon, and only then we can hope that Call of Duty series arrives to Game Pass.
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