Treyarch believes that Game Pass was the little extra that the game needed to make Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 the biggest launch in the franchise’s history.
As reported by BBC, Treyarch Associate Creative Director Miles Leslie said that it gave the game “another avenue to really get the game in the hands of players”.
He continued:
“What we’ve seen is it’s allowed people that might have been on the fence, might have had some of that friction, might have been like, ‘I haven’t played in a while’ to actually come back and try the game”
Miles Leslie has been working in Activision for 20 years, over 16 of those as part of Treyarch. His credits in the Call of Duty date all the way back to Call of Duty 2: World at War. To put it simply, he was one of those developers who was there for everything for this blockbuster series, now one of the lynchpins of the industry.
As he pointed out in the BBC interview, the opportunity to find more Call of Duty players through a subscription had simply not come up previously in that 20+ year history of the franchise as well.
And as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella himself told investors, they ended up making it the biggest launch in the franchise history, with dramatically higher sales numbers on Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam, and also an increase in Game Pass subscriptions.
This has all really been a definitive repudiation of all the doubters and fearmongers. The last time we had seen such a situation like it was when Nintendo launched their Switch console with little third-party support, and only The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild to get fans to show up for it.
In both situations, Microsoft and Nintendo only looks like they knew what they were doing all along in hindsight. In the buildup to their releases, it wasn’t just gamers and fans, but journalists and industry members who raised their doubts that Game Pass and the Switch would respectively be successful and worthwhile.
Their determination to take that risk proves that game companies need to take more risks and eschew simply meeting expectations. If future Call of Duty releases may not quite see this much success, this launch has still proven that an overwhelming success on all fronts was still possible, doing things the way Microsoft did.
And if Microsoft manages to make this success sustainable in the long term? There will no longer be any question that they are a permanent part of the video game industry, and in fact, one of its essential lynchpins.
