One Year Later, ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops 6’ Legitimizes Microsoft-Activision Deal

After nearly a year of painful restructuring, Microsoft Gaming is having its cake and eating it, too.

“Call of Duty: Black Ops 6” has delivered the biggest launch ever for gaming’s top franchise in the console space. The latest annual release from Activision didn’t just set new day-one and opening-weekend sales records, it delivered another record for most new Game Pass subscribers in a single day. Per Microsoft chief Satya Nadella, unit sales on PlayStation and Steam were up 60% year over year from the last entry.

The collective sigh of relief heard among Xbox’s leadership team likely set its own record decibel level.

Microsoft closed its $69 billion acquisition in October 2023, but in the year since, the tech giant has restructured its gaming division to the tune of around 2,900 job cuts and multiple studios closed or sold to other companies, as was the case when Krafton acquired “Hi-Fi Rush” studio Tango Gameworks after it was going to be shuttered.

While this summer’s Xbox showcase previewed a gigantic slate of games across the Xbox, Bethesda and Activision Blizzard portfolios to raucously positive reception, that first-party pipeline remains slow, with many games still lacking exact release windows. Xbox loyalists have also struggled to embrace Microsoft’s decision to bring prior exclusives to PlayStation, not to mention upcoming first-party titles, starting with “Indiana Jones and the Great Circle” in December.

Microsoft Gaming layoffs this year mostly affected the newly acquired teams across the Activision, Blizzard and King units, a dour but otherwise expected outcome from such a hefty acquisition. “Grand Theft Auto” publisher Take-Two Interactive wrote down a $2.9 billion loss in the first quarter of the year after acquiring Zynga for $12.7 billion in 2022, citing goodwill costs as it continued to cut hundreds of roles in 2024.

The “Black Ops 6” launch not only reverses Xbox’s negative cost-reduction press cycle but makes up for what was also a reversal of success for “Call of Duty” in 2023, when “Modern Warfare 3” disappointed critics and saw sales fall from 2022’s “Modern Warfare 2,” then the brand’s biggest launch ever. Warner Bros.’ “Hogwarts Legacy” ended up becoming the No. 1 game of 2023 by sales, besting “Call of Duty” in a way that has only ever been done since 2009 by Rockstar Games.

At this juncture, “Call of Duty” has four primary teams that take turns as lead developer each year, bringing this strategy into question after “Modern Warfare 3” lead Sledgehammer Games failed to match Infinity Ward’s success with the “Call of Duty” series a year prior.

This time around, lead studio Treyarch had an extra year to nail “Black Ops 6” after its last annual title, “Black Ops Cold War,” bowed as a launch title for the new Xbox Series consoles in 2020. The longer development cycle clearly paid off, but a key difference this time around was prior support studio Raven Software taking lead on the “Black Op 6” campaign, which has received rave reviews.

It’s the first time Treyarch took a backseat on the “Black Ops” campaigns, which have never been the studio’s strong suit (2018’s “Black Ops 4” skipped the campaign component entirely, the only annual “Call of Duty” entry to do so).

It’s a welcome sign of the kind of experimentation with “Call of Duty” development strategies that became possible as Activision’s prior Bobby Kotick-led administration began negotiating the exit strategy ahead of the sale to Microsoft, as keeping the franchise multiplatform is central to maintaining its sales, which clearly weren’t affected by adding Xbox Game Pass as a distribution method.

Xbox Game Pass and its PC Pass component were touted for years as the main draw for Xbox consoles as PlayStation consoles came to double their sales for more than a decade. Sony’s gaming ecosystem does have multiple subscription options through PlayStation Plus, but none offer consistent day-one access to new console exclusives including Game Pass and its PC tier. Likewise, PS Plus Premium only supports streaming games on PC, as opposed to downloads on Xbox’s PC Pass.

Even though “Black Ops” 6 was a subscription option for Xbox’s console and PC subscribers and set a record for new sign-ups in one day, the game saw larger concurrent player counts on Steam in its debut weekend than “Call of Duty’s” last two releases, per SteamDB tracking.

The exact financial implications won’t be apparent for another three months, but it’s clear the gamble of bringing “Call of Duty” and its entire corporate apparatus into the fold is finally paying off.