Modern Warfare 4 Launches at $70 Today After Microsoft Admitted Game Pass Got Too Expensive

“Got served the below ad randomly on Facebook,” a user on the gaming forum ResetEra wrote in June, pasting in an official Activision pre-order ad. “Just wild for them to know things are so messy and confusing that their social ads need to have specific callouts like this.” The callout read: “Not on Xbox Game Pass this year.”

The confusion is over now. What’s left is the number. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 launches worldwide today — PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC and, for the first time since 2013, a Nintendo console — and the only way to play it is to buy it. Standard edition: $69.99. Vault Edition: $99.99. For two years running, subscribers got the year’s biggest shooter as part of the subscription. Today it costs $70 again.

The reversal came in April, announced in a blog post and paired with a price cut. Game Pass Ultimate dropped from $29.99 a month to $22.99; PC Game Pass from $16.49 to $13.99. New Call of Duty games would reach the service “around a year after their release,” Reuters reported — a full year of full-price sales first, then the subscription window. Existing subscribers keep the older titles in the library. Every other first-party Microsoft game still launches day one.

Seven dollars a month, twelve months: $84 a year. Microsoft handed subscribers back almost exactly the price of one full game to take away the one product that had justified the $29.99 price in the first place. In October 2025, under Phil Spencer, that price had been hiked 50 percent, from $19.99, with day-one Call of Duty as the marquee feature of the top tier.

Asha Sharma took over Microsoft Gaming in February, after Spencer and Sarah Bond departed in a leadership shake-up, per Reuters. Her diagnosis arrived in a leaked April memo, obtained by The Verge: “Game Pass has become too expensive for players, so we need a better value equation.” A month later, in a second memo, she named the damage: “Growth slowed down and subscriber loss accelerated after the pricing and SKU changes last year.” She reported early results — “acquisitions grow and retention improve, which is a good first step” — and added, “We will not solve this in one moment or one launch.” The memo disclosed no subscriber figures.

The number at the center of the dispute came from Bloomberg: around $300 million in lost sales from putting Black Ops 6 on the service at launch, citing a former Xbox employee. At $70 a copy, that is the rough equivalent of 4.3 million full-price units Microsoft paid itself not to sell. “Lost sales” is the softest number in this story: an estimate of players who played instead of buying.

Circana analyst Mat Piscatella called the reversal “not surprising at all” — and then took a red pen to the $300 million. The available data, he argued, never showed day-one Game Pass denting Call of Duty sales overall — including on PlayStation, where most of the franchise’s buyers live and Game Pass has never existed. “It isn’t straight cannibalism,” Piscatella wrote, “if a person paying for Game Pass plays an offered game through the service.” Not every subscriber who played would have paid $70.

At Ampere Analysis, Piers Harding-Rolls reads the same numbers the other way. The commercial case for putting a release that big into a subscription on day one, he said, “has not been realised.” The spikes were real but didn’t stick. Ampere’s own data complicates the subscription side as well. The September 2024 price increase added roughly $1 billion in consumer spending across Game Pass tiers in 2025, the firm found. The service can raise real money from price, which makes the foregone-sales question cut harder.

The loudest outside voices stated it more bluntly. Laura Fryer, one of Xbox’s original founders, called the $29.99 hike “greed over gaming” on her personal YouTube channel. Arkane Studios founder Raphaël Colantonio described the Game Pass model as “unsustainable and damaging” in July. Sharma’s own formulation sits between them: the model “isn’t the final one.”

The first measurement of the reversed model arrived this week on Steam. In the days before launch, Modern Warfare 4 topped the platform’s global top-sellers chart, and its campaign early access — opened October 16 for pre-order buyers — climbed from about 81 percent to roughly 87 percent positive from more than 2,000 reviews, the best Steam showing for the franchise in over a decade, per Insider Gaming’s count. CoD news account CharlieIntel reported the game peaked at 108,500 concurrent Steam players, beating Black Ops 7’s all-time Steam peak.

No other Microsoft franchise got the exception. Gears of War: E-Day, Fable and Clockwork Revolution all still launch day one on Game Pass. The difference is cadence and certainty: Call of Duty ships every October and sells in the tens of millions at $70 regardless, so folding it into a subscription collides with the peak sales month on a twelve-month cycle, every year. Analyst firm Alinea’s recent figures show what day-one does to unit sales on Xbox itself: Gears of War: E-Day moved just 62,000 copies on Xbox against 1.7 million Game Pass players.

Black Ops 7, Black Ops 6 and Modern Warfare III remain on Game Pass.