So far, only one Activision Blizzard-published game has made its way to Xbox’s Game Pass subscription service, nearly a year after Microsoft finalized its deal to acquire the massive Duty publisher. But a new report claims that more Activision games will (slowly) be coming to the service in the near future.
In January 2023, Xbox announced its plans to acquire Activision Blizzard King for a total of $69 billion, the largest video game industry acquisition in history. It took almost a year of lawsuits and hearings all over the world before Microsoft could officially consume the publisher October 13, 2023Now that the deal is done, Xbox owns a bunch of franchises and games, including Call of Duty, Warcraft, And Candy crush. But so far, eight months after the deal was finalized, only one Activision game has been released:Diablo IV—has made its way to Game Pass. However, it looks like more are finally on the way.
According to a report by Windows Central on July 3, Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy will be released on Game Pass in August. The N. Sane Trilogy is a remake of the first three original Crash Bandicoot games and was released in 2017 to critical acclaim and sold well.
There are also rumors, but this has not been confirmed by the outlet, that Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 and the Spyro Reignited Trilogy are also scheduled to arrive on Game Pass after Crashpossibly later this summer.
When will Duty games end up on Game Pass?
While I’m not a fan of the video game industry cannibalizing itself,which often leads to less competition and more layoffs—it would be nice to at least get some free games out of it. So it’s nice to see that finally, after almost a year, there are more Activision titles than Diablo IV will arrive on Game Pass.
The big question I have is when will Xbox release all On-call service games to Game Pass? Most of the franchise is already playable on Xbox Series X/S, assuming you own the games, so it’s just a matter of Microsoft flipping the switch and making those games free to subscribers. I’m assuming that as we get closer to the launch of Black Ops 6 on October 25 – a game that Day One Arrival on Game Pass—we will start to see something CoD’s arrive at the service.
For now, it appears Xbox is taking its time bringing Activision’s catalog back to Game Pass, which is a stark departure from how it handled Bethesda’s library of games after acquiring the Fallout publisher in 2021.
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