Microsoft Is Reminding Xbox Game Pass Members That They'll Have to Buy Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 if They Want to Play Day One

Microsoft is sending notifications out to Xbox Game Pass members reminding them that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 won’t be in the subscription service this year, so if they want to play the game at launch, they’ll have to buy it.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 launches globally on Xbox Series X and S, PlayStation 5, PC via Battle.net, Xbox on PC, and Steam, and Nintendo Switch 2 on Friday, October 23, 2026. Microsoft has decided to stick with $70 as the standard edition price point for Call of Duty this year, resisting the temptation to go to $80 or beyond. The Vault Edition costs $100.

With Modern Warfare 4, Call of Duty is certainly changing tactics. For one, Activision has a Switch 2 version ready. Two, it’s finally leaving the last generation of consoles behind. And three, Modern Warfare 4 will not launch day one on Game Pass, after mainline Call of Duty games had done so in previous years.

One of the first decisions new Xbox boss Asha Sharma made after she replaced Phil Spencer at the top of Microsoft’s gaming business was to pull new Call of Duty launches out of Game Pass, instead adding them in a year later, while cutting the price of a subscription as part of a wider effort to rebuild the brand in the eyes of hardcore fans.

Casual Game Pass subscribers had become accustomed to new Call of Duty games popping up in their libraries on day one, so you can understand Microsoft’s thinking here. With the pressure to maximize revenue at Xbox perhaps greater than it’s ever been, Microsoft wants to make sure it captures as many Call of Duty fans as possible at launch.

The change with Call of Duty is an outlier — other first-party Xbox games remain day one launches on Game Pass, such as Gears of War: E-Day, Clockwork Revolution, and Fable. Call of Duty, though, is a bigger release than all three of those games combined, and Microsoft clearly felt it needed to move the needle back towards game sales and the revenue it brings in for its biggest franchise.

This all ties into the ongoing debate about whether Game Pass day one launches cannibalize sales. It’s an issue that has snapped at Microsoft’s heels ever since it launched the subscription service. Perhaps you could take the removal of Call of Duty as the final word on the debate — if Call of Duty can’t make Game Pass make sense, what can? But it will be interesting to see what Sharma does with Game Pass going forward. Amid rumors of a pause on new Game Pass deals with third parties, next to no growth on console, and the ongoing Xbox business “reset” that looks set to result in a handful of game studios either closing or being sold off, the future is unclear for Microsoft’s subscription service.