Has Xbox’s Call of Duty Game Pass gamble paid off?

In March 2025, according to Ampair, there were 20.6 million players of Call of Duty. That includes War Zone, that includes Black Ops 6, that includes those. That is less than the year before. Times of the essence now. If you're a mobile game developer with an established product, you should implement this Apple Tax Dodge like right now. Hello and welcome to the Game Business Show, your weekly guide to what is going on in the video game business. Uh this week, did the Call of Duty Game Pass experiment work? What does Epic's latest victory against Apple mean for the mobile market? GTA 6 has broken the internet and prices are still rising. Um some of those things uh might not sound as topical as I'd like because last week we recorded our episode. We record normally on a Wednesday afternoon, Wednesday evening to go out the next day. Uh now it can happen from time to time that maybe a story breaks a little gap but we had a couple of big stories break including the Xbox price rises including the epic Apple story. We did

actually get some briefings on those stories but uh fortunately we had already recorded last week's episode. I'm sort of used to this these things happen. I used to work on a weekly business magazine and we would go to press on a Tuesday and come out on a Thursday and sometimes our stories were outdated. Not often but it happened from time to time. And one person who knows all about that is our guest host today, Neil Long, who was actually my very first editor. Hi Neil, welcome to the show. Hello, nice to be here. Neil worked as a business journalist at MCD, left to work at Future on titles such as official Nintendo magazine and Edge Online. He did some uh stuff on mobile games at Future as well uh which impressed the folks at Apple where I think you were there for seven years. You were at Apple. Yeah, seven and a bit years. Yeah. What did you do? Yeah, I was the app store games editor for Europe back in the day 2014 before it got redesigned. The app store had a weekly sort of editor's choice that was by the editors and I was part of that team heading up the games decisionm and

editorial. Well, since then Neil has set up mobile gamer.biz which is the best business publication out there about the mobile games market. Sorry, Pocket Gamer. You're lovely, too. But ultimat ultimately, when chatting about mobile games on the Game Business Show, I can't think of many more people better suited than Neil. But before we get to our stories and and find out what he was up to, got a little house announcement. Um, the Game Business Live, our first physical event takes place on June 9th in Los Angeles at the Grammy Museum. It's part of Summer Gamefest. By the time this episode goes out, we should have our first announcement nearly out there. It might be out there, it might not be out there about who is speaking. But basically, we will be recording three to four episodes of the game business show back to back. Uh we've got some great names on the bill and hopefully we'll be able to uh tell you who those are in the next few hours. There will be some exclusive data analysis as well and the whole thing will be around two maybe just over two hours long. We'll have reception as well. For those hoping to come along, there are two ways in which you can come to the event. First is by buying a

Playdays industry ticket. Now, Play Days is a media event that takes place as part of Summer GameFest. It's where press go hands- on with the games, introduce the creators, that kind of thing. I've been the last couple of years. It's pretty chilled out and there's usually lots of cool companies there. On Monday, June 9th, there are general industry tickets available for people who can buy tickets to go to that. If you get one of those, you're welcome to come along to the Game Business Live. Access the Game Business Live is included in that ticket and we're about 10 minutes away from each other. We're not the same event. We are organized by different people, but we're part of the same family. The second way is that uh we're opening free registration for the game business readers, listeners or viewers. So registration will be live imminently. The only catch is that you need to be a TGB reader. And to be a TGB reader, simply go to the game business.com, stick your email address in there. If you've done that, then you see to register for your free pass. Uh we've got I think around 150 passes available. It's not quite first come first serve because we want to avoid one company taking up half the tickets and that sort of stuff, but we will try and accommodate as many of you as we can. as fairly as we can. Um, but that's me.

Neil, aren't you doing an event in LA too around the same time? I am. Uh, I'm doing it the day after yours actually. Um, so I I'm holding an event in LA. More details to be announced soon hopefully. Um, but yeah, June the 10 near to where Play Days and Summer GameFest is happening just the day after yours. Invite only. It's called Off the Record. Everything is off the record. So, I'm not sort of recording anything. I'm not going to write any coverage based on what is said at the event. We did an off thereord event in London uh in early April and people really like the format. So, we're doing it again in LA with the help of some partners to be announced. Yeah, I love the name off the record. It reminds me of a MCV section. Uh let's talk video game industry then. Let's get back to actually our jobs. Neil, what's going on in your world? Have I seen you've been covering an advertising campaign? Is that right? Yes. Yeah. Um I I think if you've been on Instagram or Tik Tok or any other

sort of form of social media in the last sort of month or so, you will have seen ads for Royal Kingdom. So this is the second game from Dream Games, the follow-up to Royal Match. Kind of very similar game, match three game involving a king. I think it's King Richard in the new one. Basically early April, Dream Games, they enlisted a load of celebrities including LeBron James, Jimmy Fallon, Shakira, the couple from the Big Bang Theory, Jennifer Aston, Lisa Kudro, Kevin Hart, many, many more for their mobile ad campaign. I did a story a couple of weeks ago where I asked some sources who have put together celebrity ad campaigns before and got them to sort of estimate how much those celebrities got paid for those spots. So yeah, uh that's proven to be quite a popular story on uh mobile gamer.biz. The details for those who want to know, LeBron probably got about 4 million for

about 5 hours work, 5 to seven hours work was the estimate. And Jimmy Fallon, Shakira, and so on probably all got about a million each for a couple of hours work. Not bad. Yeah, not bad. you know, um, they got some other estimates as well cuz you may remember Supercell launched a game called Squadbusters last year. Uh, they had Chris Hemsworth in that ad. Your sword play. Tell me about your sword play. He is a bridge that also pillaged a few villages. He, it is estimated he got about 2 million for maybe a couple of days work. It's slightly more involved ad where they're kind of rampaging around in this anchorman style skit. And the other stars of that ad, Will Arnett, Christina Richi, Ken Jong, Ollie Crabthalio, have I got that? That's Moana. Basically, they will have got around 2 million as well. And there's also, you know, Monopoly Goad doing the rounds a few months ago. Will Farel, Jason Mamo,

Chris Pratt, Kiki Palmer, they all probably got about 2 million. So, yeah, that's been a popular string of stories on my site recently. and uh you know just makes you feel like we're maybe in the wrong business. Uh Chris, well you know you don't get many celebrity endorsements. You get a lot of them in mobile. Mhm. Maybe I'm just not seeing them as much, but they seem to get fewer and fewer in the in the rest of the space. Is it just because mobile makes all the money now and that's the uh or is it more to do with the audience? Yeah, it's it's kind of you pick your celebrity based on the audience. So like your kind of Candy Crush Mums so to speak, you will pick like a, you know, a Stacy Solomon who no one outside the UK will have heard of. Sort of Robbie Williams, that kind of celebrity. A while back it was a game called Coin Master Enlisted the Spice Girls. Um, so it's all kind of millennial kind of celebrities if you if you know what I mean because they're the people playing mobile games a lot of the time. So, it's an interesting

interesting development. I think the Royal Kingdom ad campaign probably is the biggest celebrity ad campaign ever given the combined spend on those celebrities. So, yeah, that's what's going on in mobile. Celebrities and a lot of money flying around. Well, what's going on in in PC and console is uh Grand Theft Auto 6. It's uh sending tremors around the business this week. Uh, first of the news, the game is not coming out this year. It'll it's launching now May 26, 2026, which for us oldies is actually the classic Rockstar slot. Um, GTA 4, Red Dead Redemption, LA Noir, Max Pain 3 all launched within that sort of May spring window back in 2008, 2010, 2011, and 2012. So, I feel nostalgic for this um even though that's, you know, upsettingly like 15 years ago. But then a few days back on Tuesday, Rockstar broke the internet with a pretty impressive looking trailer for uh GTA 6. I think it was impressive. These things just keep looking better and better for me. Neil, are you are you a GTA person?

Are you a fan? Yes, kind of. I like driving around causing chaos and explosions and stuff like that, but uh the writing and characters in GTA 5 in particular are appalling in my opinion. Um, I Yeah, the satire that or the you know what is supposed to be satire in GTA is a bit a bit on the nose for my tastes. Yeah, I'll put it like that. Oddly, and this is nothing cuz I was a Nintendo boy up until about PS3 era. I never had a console that had GTA on it. And then by the time that had came out, I played GTA 4 a lot. I've never played GTA 5. It's done like 180 million, probably way more than that now, game sales. And I have actually have bought the game twice, but I've not got past the opening bit. Yeah, it just it never hit me at the right time. It's not a a slight on the experience of the game. I I I have no comment on that at all. Um, but obviously this is a big industry story. I did write about it last week. I talked about how a lot of people were hoping this year there's a survive till

2025 thing and it's a it's not I don't I don't really like that. I've never really liked that because you really ought to just be trying to thrive wherever you are and whatever situation you're in. But part of that was hope that this year was going to be a particularly big year for video games. a lot of attention on it because of their Switch 2 and then GTA 5. And I know you get these comments on social media and I've seen some people saying that GTA was never going to save the industry. But I think we can underestimate the power of a big entertainment moment like that because it will boost engagement. It will boost interest, attention, media traffic, console sales, social media conversation. We saw what Barbie and Oppenheimer did in Hollywood, right? I remember like weeks before that came out. Hollywood was dead. Nobody. It was over. And then like the weekend afterwards it was saved and everything was bad. So and okay obviously Barbie and Oppenheimer didn't sustain things indefinitely. It's not it's not enough on its own but I think it can give a massive lift to the market. Obviously it's not necessarily great for anyone else. Everyone else has run away from that game and now they're trying to work out actually can we find is there gaps in that Q4 schedule that we can move

into. I don't think they will. I don't think there will be many games be able to pull forward out of 2025 2026 sorry into that window. There might be some people that can delay a little bit. I think the Mafia game doesn't have a release date yet. Maybe there's there's a there's a spot there for it in in Q4 that it wouldn't have got pre. Maybe there's a bit more marketing spend to spend on games. Bit more attention being put on these titles because there's room. I think it's good news for Nintendo. And I know a lot of people would say that GTA and Nintendo don't have the same audience, but I think it's a lot closer these days than it used to be. GTA Trilogy did very very well on Switch. And there's definitely a nostalgic sort of parent audience. The parents that own that are buying switches today grew up with GTA. I do think the fact that, you know, was going to be a big moment for PS5 this Christmas and I don't think PS5 is necessary going to have that moment anymore. Not in the same way anyway. So Nintendo's sort of got that console space to itself. I think it is good news for Nintendo, but you know, it's still the moment's still coming. It's just we're going to have to wait a bit longer. I guess it's not really a thing in mobile because, you know, it's it's a PlayStation Xbox game. It's not really a

thing in mobile. mobile is kind of just a relentless uh wave of new releases that often don't really hit the mark and thenly disappear and then it's a load of sort of pre-existing live service games that sort of keep increasing in terms of revenue and and player base. But isn't it good for the games business in general not to have this sort of bottleneck of Switch 2 and GTA 6 in the same year? So now that Switch 2 can have from the summer onwards right through to the end of the year, not that people can only focus on one thing, but it might help spread out what many see as the comeback of the games industry or whatever you want to however you want to term it. That might spread it out a little bit more. Isn't that good? Well, maybe I I think it depends what Nintendo has for Q4. Also, you know, how much stock do they have available, right? I see it as a great thing. If PlayStation 5 had a good Christmas alongside Nintendo, I think that'd be, you know, a boost the whole market. you've got to be on Nintendo to benefit from it. And

there were a lot of positives to it. Um, as I say, clears cute Christmas up for the market. We did a story about a month ago about how basically the six weeks around GTA, 3 weeks before and 3 weeks after, you're going to get nothing. You're going to get nothing on live service games. You're going to get no big releases. It is just going to be nothing. And it would have been a great moment for the games industry, but it isn't great for see for everybody else. And actually, launching in May, it's not always quite in May. you know, only a couple of years ago you had like Zelda and Street Fighter and Final Fantasy all in that sort of May June window, but it's often quiet and it's less of a thing. I think it launches in that spot. And also, isn't that that type of maybe the GTA consumer? They're often the guys who probably mainly these guys who just buy a PlayStation for Call of Duty or FIFA or Madden and like GTA will be a day one purchase for them, but they're not the type of consumer who's going to be out there buying, you know, Ghost of Yate or one of the other AAA hyper hyper

mainstream releases that are coming this Q4. The thing is we've got this phenomena where lots of people are playing on PS4. You name the games there. Call of Duty Z, FIFA or E8 Sports FC, Fortnite. And the thing is all those games are still coming out on PS4 and they still run really, really well. And particularly with younger generations that aren't necessarily that bothered by the graphics thing. They've not seen the reason to upgrade to PS5. The PS5 is doing fine because of that, but actually Xbox isn't doing very well. So overall, the console market is behind this generation than it was um at the same point. the previous generation and there's like what's going to get those customers to upgrade and I think people looked at GTA as being one of the big games that was going to the big game that might instigate that surge of people finally upgrading from PS4 to PS5 and you know it's worth noting that the game's now coming out what will be almost 6 years since the PS5 released right we're into the finale of you know if this was a normal console generation we're in the finale of the console generation um I feel was absolutely

barmy to be saying that it's coming quite late I think it is a good I think overall is a good thing. I think the media will be a little bit worried about traffic perhaps, but hopefully um there'll be some increased marketing spend in other areas. Accessories firms, console sales might take a bit of a hit, but they will still happen just 6 months later. So, I think overall is a pretty good thing, but it means that that 2025 is is I think the console market will still be down will be down again. I think we're probably going to end up with the headline at the end of the year being another decline for the video game industry in 2025. Certainly the PC and console side as a result of this delay. If I was at PlayStation, I would be out there with Rockstar saying, "Can we do a bundle with like a pre-order voucher for GTA 6 that we can get out for this Christmas, right? You get people to upgrade this Christmas and then when it drops in May 2026, it just loads straight away. Is that a dumb idea? Has anyone done that?

I don't know. I don't know. PlayStation's listening. Let us know. Is that a dumb idea? Yeah. I did actually a similar bundle idea to PlayStation because I said that the generation of people who grew up with GTA now parents, they've got kids. They're going, should we get the kids a Switch 2 this Christmas with Mario Kart or should we get ourselves GTA with something else? And now I s you should do a GTA 6 Astrobot bundle. Yes. Call the the PlayStation 5 family bundle. I'm sure the age ratings companies would have something to say about that. Yeah, I think that would be a a worthwhile bundle. Yeah. But then again, it won't be a cheap bundle because the other story this week we we covered was that Xbox has raised the price of well everything including introducing $80 games by the end of the year. Uh they raised the price of the controllers, the consoles. It varied in different countries. Actually in the UK the increase on the Xbox Series X is about 20 quid which is too bad. Um, in Europe it's $50 and in the US it's $100. I am going to talk more about price rises

generally next week. So I won't spend too much time on this now, but obviously it's an ongoing story. The hardware side is is obviously related to tariffs. Nobody's saying the tariff war. They don't want to uh incur the raff I guess of Donald Trump or his supporters. But the software side is is not related to tariffs. It will be due to not yet anyway. It'll be due to the rising cost of development that we've been talking about. There were predictions earlier in the year. We had Matthew Ball on the show predicting that price rises was going to happen on games. They thought GTA was going to be that moment. They didn't expect it to be Mario Kart. It's certainly Neil, what's your take on is, you know, you work in a world where games are next to nothing. Yeah, they're all free on mobile mostly and premium only really exists for the likes of Minecraft and Batro, which is how you're supposed to pronounce it apparently, and a couple of other sort of outliers. Yeah, I mean, as a consumer, having had minimal interest in buying an Xbox anyway, um there's even less now. I don't I, you know, I'm happy with my PS5, PlayStation Plus. The free games every month keep me pretty well fed as a

sort of moderately casual player. I understand the terrace thing, but also this is just going to kill their hardware business, isn't it? It's not already dead. Yeah, it's we'll talk about this in a moment, but PlayStation obviously are now the dominant player, very much dominant. They always were number one, but they they are so dominant now in the console space if you're counting Nintendo separately, which I don't think you should. Xbox's strategy has shifted. I don't think there's a game on the schedule. Actually, let me just check. I don't think there's a game on the schedule that Xbox has coming up this week year that isn't launching at the same time on PlayStation. Yeah, that's Wow. It's completely It's a different world. Um, you know, there was a time when it was Yeah. Outerworlds, PlayStation 5, Doom PlayStation 5. Tony was pro skate 4, PlayStation 5, Call of Duty, PlayStation 5. Like, it's all coming to PlayStation 5. Gears of War Reloaded, which is a bit more of an unusual. We wouldn't expect to see that come to PlayStation 5. We just had Forza come to PlayStation 5. Oblivion launched on PlayStation 5. These are all Microsoft published games. Yes, I think Avou and South Midnight weren't on PS5. I wouldn't be surprised

that that's the end. That's the end of Xbox exclusives, those games. I mean, they're on PC as well, so in many respect, they were already not Xbox exclusives. And that's Xbox's strategy. They they shifted away from that. That's, you know, publishers, certain publishers and developers have spoken to me like baffled by this because from their point of view, they want the competition in the console space. They they they're going, why should we even bother making an Xbox game if this is the strategy? That's a balance that Microsoft's going to have to strike. And you know, they need the Xbox is a game pass machine. And this is what you say, you know, we talk about the $80 games. Most people, not maybe not most people, but a lot of people are who own Xbox Series X's and S's, they're game pass subscribers. And I do think the value of that is starting to from a consumer point of view is starting to become really appealing because I was I looked at this I this is anecdotally I don't want to base anything based on my own experience considering don't get to play that many games but I I've been a Game Pass subscriber since 2018. The last Xbox game I actually bought was Sea of Thieves. And I looked at how many games that I would have bought if I wasn't a Game Pass subscriber. And there was a

couple of Forsa Horizons, Halo, Infinite, few others, maybe Starfield, um, a couple of games there. But I actually thought to myself, actually, I think Xbox may have got more money out of me as a Game Pass subscriber than they would have done if I had been a a if I actually bought the games normally. That's not true this year cuz this year I probably would give Call of Duty a go cuz in Game Path, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+ 4, Oblivion, okay, it's all appealing to somebody who's approaching 40, all this stuff. The um the Indiana Jones game, there's probably about three or four games this year that I'm really looking forward to that I don't even have to buy. They're in the subscription service. I do think the subscription service is becoming quite appealing, right? And I do think they add value everywhere. It's worth knowing you buy a game, this isn't this doesn't affect me and how I play, but it will affect other people. If you buy a first party game on Xbox, you get the version on PC as well. You're not you don't have to buy another version of that game and you can do crossplay and cross progression and so they're offering a lot of value that way. You've got Nintendo doing the similar things. They've obviously raised the price of the Switch games, but you can play with your friends using GameS

Share so that you know you don't have all have to have same copy of the game. There's a lot of sort of trying to make that price a little bit more palatable, I think. But ultimately, my problem with these price rises, it's less about um and PlayStation will follow suit at some point. My feeling with it all is that we as an industry, particularly the console and PC side, it might sort out the revenue problem we've got on the profit margin problem. It's not going to solve the growth problem where we're seeing users disappear from gaming rather than rather than coming back into it, PC and console side anyway. And increasing that price is going to hurt that. I think the real focus needs to be getting on dev costs being lower. And I know that's not going to be the case the big games like GTA would be should be as expensive as it would take to make but you know I think we just seen and I don't and I'm really cautious of saying this because obviously we've seen Clare obscure we've seen Space Marine 2. We've seen quite a few games over the last four or five years actually but certainly starting to spot them a little bit more obviously now. They're not cheap to make. They're not hyper expensive either and they're not super long. They're not filled with

content. They don't have they don't do a hundred things. There's not like driving as well as stealth as well as they just go right we're going to do this one thing really well to AAA standard this one thing AAA standard and it's finding an audience because maybe they haven't the audience hasn't seen something like that for a while maybe they've never seen anything like it before and it's starting to find an audience it's resonating very strongly and then it breaks out and we've seen that with Clare Obscure we saw that with Space Me 2 last year we've seen it with Hell Divers 2 and other games like that doesn't mean AAA can't work we've also just had Kingdom Come Liver 2 and Monster Hunter Wilds and Assassin's Creed Shadows but I think it's for a lot of developers, rather than go, "Oh, let's just keep making the games the way we're making them and let's just make them $80." I think the other option is, "Hey, can we make these games on half the budget in half the time and maybe we wouldn't we're not going to have to hurt things in that regard." But, um, I don't know. It's weird cuz I remember N64 games costing this amount of money. Yeah. I remember my little brother and I I think we saved up for Donkey Kong 64 with the little expansion pack thing for what felt like 3 years uh

and then combined our money to buy it. Times have changed definitely. I I think you know what what you're talking about there in terms of dev costs and like the market and reaching the right players just to bring it back to mobile to annoy your readers and listeners and viewers who aren't interested. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of what happens in mobile then happens in PC and console like three or four years later. So for a long time in mobile, new releases have been very very tightly targeted and very deliberately targeted at a certain type of consumer. Game teams in China have been like the dominant force in the last couple of years and they are able to sort of produce games more quickly of a very high standard which is you know what is happening in PC and console a lot of the time. Both you and I were at the Netflix thing GDC where they sort of outlined their games vision. You picked up on the same point I have in the past where they

are looking at this sort of party play kind of couch everyone around the TV type of game that the Wii was really built on the success of the Wii is really built on and there's no one really going for that market. What I see from mobile looking into PC and console, I see a load of game developers making what look like very similar games for very similar audiences. It takes some sort of guts and it's a risk, but finding new audiences is going to ultimately expand the market and be better for everyone. and focusing down and down and down on the same players buying the same types of games all the time is just a sort of a bit of a vicious cycle in mobile. That happens too. You know, there's lots of games out there that are focused on, you know, a high-spending strategy dads, I like to call them, who play, you know, these

forex strategy games on mobile. There are lots of those games, too. But um while you do have to rely on your sort of uh deaderts, your kind of cash cows, you've always got to be trying to look for the new consumer as well. It's balancing that that sort of riskreward well is really the the key to success in the games business. But you know, that's easier said than done by the likes of us. Yeah. Well, I said I wasn't going to talk about this too much and we did. So, let's go on to our main uh topic of the week. This is a uh one of our big stories. We've got a couple which is it's an original story. This one it ties a little bit to some of the game pass stuff we were talking about. Call of Duty Black Ops 6 going into Game Pass. It caused a big bump in subscribers uh to the subscription service and a strong opening for the game certainly in terms of players. But the quick big question is has that sustained? Neil, do you want to hear me sprout some stats? I would love to hear some stats. Um, has Seth Rogan's presence, is it? Is it Seth

Rogan? Is he turned up in it in Black Ops? They did the Squid Game thing back in January. I'm not sure the fans like it is uh is what I'm hearing. Well, yeah, let's just do the numbers. I think it's is nuts. So, in November 2024 when Call of Duty Black Ops 6 was released on this is on consoles alone, so I'm not including PC in any of this data because it's it's a little bit easier to talk about. Um, according to Ampair, 33.7 million players were playing Call of Duty Black Ops 6. Or actually, it wasn't just Call of Duty Black Ops 6. It was Call of Duty generally that month in November. Something called Call of Duty HQ. Now, we know that was a record-breaking number. Microsoft declared it the biggest Call of Duty weekend ever. That's not news. Um, it's not a that's not revenue. They didn't talk about money, but they talked about players. It was a record-breaking. But how much of a jump was that actually in terms of was it a huge jump? Was it a big jump? Well, compared to 2023 game, it was a massive jump. So, um almost 13 million pe more people were playing Call

of Duty in November 2024 compared with November 2023 when Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 launched. Um but I would argue that jump is a little misleading. 2023's Call of Duty was poorly received. It wasn't quite the full expansive Call of Duty experience that people had come to expect. Reports from the press suggested it was actually supposed to be an expansion initially. So, I thought it would be better to compare it against uh to compare this the latest Call of Duty with the 2022 version. And yes, 2024's Call of Duty is bigger, we know that, than 2022s, but the it's not quite as drastic. So, Modern Warfare 2, which was the game released in 2022. That game helped draw in 31.4 million players into Call of Duty. Uh that's a that's a still a good jump. It's 2 and a half million players more in the latest game than it was that game. Obviously, it's not quite as drastic. So you can see that that alone suggests Game Pass did benefit um uh uh uh the launch at least in terms of players. Probably not revenue uh but it had a big launch. Neil, did you know Neil, you're not a Call of Duty player,

are you? I'm not. No. Hypothetically, if you were to play it, and I know you got a PlayStation, so this is kind of mute, but hypothetically, if you were to play it, would you be tempted to go down the Game Pass route? Um do it that way rather it? From the outside, it looks uh pretty baffling as a if if you're a a player that's new to Call of Duty and you don't already have like a social network of friends who are playing it. Um getting into it feels like uh quite a big job and I don't really want to. It feels like a sort of bas you can do to convince you. Game passes and convincing you a ghost. Honestly, no. if they just called it Call of Duty um and stopped with the Modern Warfare 6, whatever it is, Black Ops 6. Well, thing is I quoting Modern Warfare 2, Modern Warfare 3, which yeah, they're not the first Modern Warfare 2 to Modern Warfare 3s. Yeah. For the for the casual consumer, which again, you know, touching upon what we talked about before, they should

be trying their best to get they've got to balance these hard players and get more people through the door. But from the outside, as a casual, fairly casual consumer, I don't know. It all looks too complicated. And I don't know. Well, it it was good for Game Pass. So, at launch anyway, it was good for Game Pass and Xbox generally. So, according to Sakana, spending on game subscriptions, not just Game Pass, was up 12% in Q4 2023 compared with Q4. So, in Q4 2024 compared with Q4 2023. That's not just Game Pass, but Game Pass is the big reason for that growth. Xbox said it had the largest, you know, you know, um, influx of players in a single day into Game Pass when Call of Duty Black Ops 6 launched. So, it was good for Game Pass at the start and you can see the benefit in terms of market share, too. So, going back to ampair data and again, this is just consoles, not including PC in here. 47% of Call of Duty players in November last year played the franchise on an Xbox system. So, PlayStation still accounted for the majority of it, but

53%. That's a huge jump over the year before when Xbox's market share on Call of Duty was just 35%. So Call of Duty, you know, as a result of them putting into Game Pass, they got a lot they had a lot bigger share of the player count. It's actually not that big of a difference compared with 2022's Call of Duty. Back then, Xbox had a pretty impressive 44% market share in terms of Call of Duty players. So it's only in 3 percentage point increase, but now that actually isn't to do that speaks to um we talked about this earlier um the gap between Xbox and PlayStation. Um, so in the US, which is where Call of Duty is most dominant, the gap between Xbox and PlayStation was about 6 million consoles in 2022. So PlayStation being ahead by about 6 million consoles. This is active consoles according to Ampair. By November 2024, that jumped to 10 million. So what you're seeing is even though the percentage growth may in terms of market share may seem quite low, you need to remember that Xbox has fallen away quite a bit as a platform in those two years. But in conclusion, at launch, Call of Duty going into Game Pass resulted in more players for the game. a big spike in spend on

subscription services and saw Xbox take a strong market share on the Call of Duty IP so far so good. But that was then. Do you want to hear what happened next? I'd love to. Yeah, of course. Of course you of course you do. You want to know? Um well, Call of Duty has had a bit of a hard time. It saw a sharp drop in users every month actually since 2024. Um, now part of that might be to do with game pass related to begin with because you do get people who will try something in game pass, give something a go, I play Call of Duty 4, I'll give it a go and then go, you know, it's not for me. Um, and drop out. So some of that early doors might be Game Pass related, so that drop. But actually, I think the biggest um uh it's it's doing quite badly with fans. If you go on Steam, it's mostly negative. Now, Call of Duty tends to get a hammering from fans because of its monetization and all that kind of stuff, but it certainly doesn't seem to be going very well in terms of the numbers. Um, so Call of Duty in March 2025, according to Ampair, there were 20.6 million players of Call of Duty. That includes War Zone, that

includes Black Ops 6, that includes those. That is less than the year before. So March 2025 has fewer Call of Duty players than March 2024 when it was 20.8 million. It's close. And it's less than it was in 2023 when it's 22.4 million players. So Call of Duty is really struggling. I mean, it's still huge numbers, right? It's still obviously a mega, but when you consider it had the biggest launch ever, and now its March numbers are down even on previous year's game, which was not a well-received game. Um, obviously not, again, this is also including War Zone and and you can expect that, you know, Call of Duty is a premium product as well, and people do play the single player. So, there's lots of things to factor into this. But when you look at Xbox's market share, and this is interesting. So Xbox's market share on Call of Duty this year is 36.5%. That's a little bit up over the year before when it was 32.5%, but it's actually down on Call of Duty 2022. So again, this is this is related to um uh the fact that Xbox is just not as popular as a console anymore as it was.

But uh you are starting to see it starting to wayne on Xbox harder than it is on on other platforms. Their their market share has dropped by, you know, by a good 10% um over the last since it came out in November 2024 to March 2025. Um so it's having a hard time. Xbox isn't necessarily seeing the market share that it was overall it is but in certainly come March but what I wanted to was but what about subscription service have people you know have they all unsubscribed now that uh uh uh um um now that that's happened actually no so I've got some data from Sakana I'm going to get it up here um this is Matt from Sagana thank you for sharing some details um uh to the growth has eased just slightly compared to the Call of Duty Game Pass windows. Um um uh so total spend on so Q1 2025 sorry US spending on video game subscription services were up 11% compared to Q1

2034. So it was 12% for Q4. So what that means is that yes this we've seen some decline but it's still very up. So this is Q1 data but it's still the game not people are still subscribed to Game Pass. It's still stronger numbers there. Um, but yeah, they they back up what we said that, you know, there's no significant difference now between PlayStation, Xbox in the US. In March, 33.3% of active PlayStation players engaged with Call of Duty on that ex on Xbox. That figure was also 33.3%. That's a kind of player engagement data. So, backs up, broadly speaking, it's like what Ampair um was saying. So, you are it's it's had a bit of a hard time, but but there is still more Game Pass subscribers now, way more than there were um um before. uh the subscription service and again uni it's worth noting that that decline in in play you know even though the market share is only 36 and a half% which is similar to how it was two years ago it's not too bad when you consider how how big PlayStation is now versus Xbox as a platform there we

are I don't really have anything sorry Neil no I just working at you with numbers were you following that I was following it I was just thinking you know if Call of Duty is the entry point for game pass really is the main selling point. Do they have an entrylevel subscription tier just for Call of Duty guys who want to sign up to this? Because Game Pass as again as a sort of fairly casual consumer of uh games. Game Pass as a proposition doesn't have like a focal point. It's just here are a load of games that you may or may not enjoy. Whereas Call of Duty appears to be a very very good and you know possibly the main focal point and main reason to get an Xbox and get Game Pass, right? That's why Microsoft bought Activision. Yeah. So it's slightly puzzling to me why they haven't effectively marketed Game Pass as the Call of Duty pass. Are there sort

of legal problems related to that? Is it I don't really get it. uh as a as a prop. Well, I I think they've shifted their strategy a little bit. So, it was at one point all about Game Pass and now I think they just realize Game Pass is one avenue. Yeah. To helping that discoverability and finding new audiences. And ultimately, I think Xbox is just a big publisher now. And they not they're not just a big publisher, but that is where they are. That's where they're at. And ultimately, I think Game Pass as a monetization mechanism for those sort of games isn't great. And so, you know, making a cheaper entry-level version of Game Pass that's very focused on Call of Duty. Maybe maybe we'll see that going forward. They've certainly got a lot of data, I guess, for this one to see see what to do going or are they sort of quietly just quietly kind of giving up on Game Pass in general and they're going forward they're going to focus on just being a very very large publisher of games. I think it's both. I think I think I don't think so. I think they've had to move to PlayStation in order to make these games justify their their investment. But I think Game Pass is a

very sustainable business model. It's just making sure that that doesn't, you know, if they can get their costs under control and make sure that their premium business remains strong, then it it does a good thing. It's just it's just one part of their wider ecosystem. I don't think it's a case of we need to scale that back, but you starting to see more big special editions. You can get the game earlier if you pay money and that kind of stuff. They need to monetize these games better. I'm conscious of the time and we haven't gotten to the topic that actually I brought you in for Neil, which is Apple versus Epic. Rather than me trying to garble my way through what all this is about, Neil, what's going on? What's happening here? Well, what isn't going on? Epic originally started court proceedings against Apple because it back in uh 2020 perhaps. I can't remember the exact dates, but you've got to remember that this is all Epic's fault. And you know, they had all this 1984 free Fortnite stuff all planned out. They flipped the switch on this Fortnite update across all versions iOS and Android which allowed sort of outside payments to happen on mobile.

Immediately Apple sort of pulled it from the store. I was actually working at Apple when this happened and the Slack conversations were very amusing. Epic was immediately thrown out of the app store for violating those terms of service or the developer agreement which they knew they were doing. and they had all of this these ads all ready to go as soon as soon as that happened. there's some cheekiness on their part. um which is sort of Tim Sweeney uh Tim Sweeny's work which he's been you know he's been great for the last five years uh in terms of providing the likes of us with fun quotes but there was a long court battle and actually the judge decided that while yes Epic had some had made some good points about Apple forcing developers to not tell customers about where they could find cheaper prices or outside payments within apps. Broadly, Apple was not a monopoly and it it won most of that that case. But within that

ruling, Apple was asked to open up its app store a little bit and allow developers to tell people about outside payments and other means to pay for inapp purchases, which is the sort of crux of the issue. And obviously, you know, for those not aware, Apple takes 30% of, if you're a company of a certain size, Apple takes 30% of all inapp purchases. So 30% of your business is not a small amount of money, especially if you are Epic and you are running Fortnite on mobile. So the crux of all of this is that 30% and whether Apple is really justifying taking that much money out of practically every mobile game developers pockets. Google does the same. It has slightly looser rules on its ecosystem, but you know, broadly speaking, you know, there's lots of court cases and and legal proceedings going on involving Apple and Google and that 30% because, you know, very broadly speaking,

developers are pretty unhappy with 30% of their business being taken while Apple and Google just make colossal profits out of games that they did not develop or release in any way. They're just a distribution platform. So, fast forward to 2025. Apple hasn't Apple hasn't really followed through with that, right? Yes. They've been cheeky. Cheeky is the word. Um, and uh breaking the law is another way to put it. Um, after that initial ruling, the judge was not satisfied with Apple's response to that, which involved um yet allowing outside payments, but also charging like 27% uh commission. also making developers jump through all kinds of hoops too. Scarecrow. Yeah. Yeah. Scare screens, all sorts of stuff. So over time uh the judge looked into the sort of he the judge got uh all of the sort of internal documents, black messages, emails, everything, meetings,

uh minutes and found that uh Apple had engaged in, you know, some quite obvious, as Tim Sweeney would put it, um malicious compliance where they technically changed their rules to comply with the the ruling, but in practicality, it was all done to, you protect that 30%. So basically last week the judge had had enough and just said look Apple stop this I'm going to say effective immediately all US this is just for the US all US app store game developers can offer alternative payments and point customers to where they can get a better deal basically and you know likes to Spotify uh Patreon has just gone live as well you know now in Spotify you can just rather than you know years ago So, they weren't even allowed to say you can get a better deal online that as part of Apple's rules. Now, a little web view pops up and you can just subscribe through the web in

Spotify, dodging the 30% entirely. Um, so potentially lots of mobile game developers uh including Epic will no longer have to pay 30% on the revenue flowing through the US app store. It's not just that though. And actually I had a chat with Exola. Exola a payments company. They do the web stores. If you're a developer that goes, I want to dodge this 30% 30% or at least offer an alternative to this to Apple's payments. Um Exola is one of company that can do that. They also do a lot more than that. Um they can set up their web shop for you. They're not the only there other companies out there that do this. But there Exoda is one you see the ads everywhere for them. So I thought I'd have a chat with them. They said they've seen a significant uptick in inbound inquiries since the US uh judge's ruling. And um this is what they said. Were there devs that were put off by these friction points that have been put in place where they're going, you know what, it's just not worth the hassle. Did you find? Yes. And I think there's two sides to that coin. There were certainly developers that felt, okay,

you know, there's really not as much opportunity to connect uh players or direct them outside of the app stores or offplatform uh because it's just too hard, right? There's the scare messages that were going up. there's the extra tax that gets put on offplatform transactions or had been attempted to be put on and that that had some marginal impact. I would say there were plenty of companies that had embraced web shops and had found ways to direct their players to these web shops and they saw the the benefit there with not just increased margins but increased overall revenue. But, you know, it was hard, right? You had to connect through Discord or through other off-ch communication platforms to let players know about it. Now, you know, you can let players know directly in the app. And so, I think from a developer standpoint, it removes the final barrier to people, you know, resisting it. Not resisting, but feeling that, hey, maybe we just don't have the resources to fully engage with this, right? We understand the value, but we don't have

an extra person to go, you know, manage a Discord community to turn people over here or handle the extra customer support or whatever. But I think from a consumer standpoint, it really opens up the door to a lot of consumers that up to now it's kind of been more your core player base that ones that were actively searching for opportunities and and we're finding this. Now you can really um connect with your entire player base. And that's where I think the real opportunity is now to turn this into a a meaningful party. it's already been a meaningful part of your business, but to make it something that benefits your entire player base is what I'm trying to say. So, you know, this I think has a real positive opportunity for casual games, expanding, you know, the midcore games that were starting to engage with this. So, I think it opens more game genres and more segments up to being able to take advantage of this and it puts it front and center for all players to be able to see that these

opportunities are there to not only go off platform to get better offers or better deals, but to actually be able to connect with a a full ecosystem and a full community, right? Because, you know, if you're doing a web shop or an offplatform experience, it should be more than just a store. you know, you should really an opportunity to build a hub that connects your entire ecosystem and players now can be aware of that no matter where they're playing your game or engaging from. How important is this do you think from your point of view as strategy officer in driving the overall growth? Where's the growth coming from is a big question that we're all asking ourselves. And with lots of small little pockets of areas, how significant do you think this this bit is? I think it's very significant. And obviously, you know, the story is still playing out. We have to see what happens with appeals and with things like that, but the momentum is there and it's moving forward. So, I think it's incredibly significant for a few reasons. One, as I alluded to earlier, is strategically when you're thinking about your game

business, thinking about it as an ecosystem, right? Not just a, oh, here's a storefront that we're selling our game on. thinking about a full ecosystem that connects not just the distribution part, but you know where you get your game and the platforms you play on, but the community behind the game, being able to connect with the developers more, be involved in live events that are happening, you know, on other platforms, other channels. So that idea that it's not just a single point of purchase, but it's like no, now we truly can unlock and build and leverage this whole ecosystem of all these different touch points for our game or for you know I I think of games as a hobby, right? And uh you know if you're thinking of it of this is somebody's hobby that they engage with and you think about other hobbies out there, how there are so many touch points that are all connected together. So I think strategically there's a great opportunity there to really build out your ecosystem for your game and your community. So that's huge,

right? And this is a big piece of opening that up because you can now communicate, you know, through that wall that had been there before. That's, you know, a big part of it. And then obviously the being able to get a full picture of your player data where before a lot of what was happening on platform was lost to you. That's big uh because it means you can actually provide better value to your players. you can operate your business more efficiently. It also helps with discovery which has been a major issue for games where platforms have become so crowded that we all know discovery is one of the number one problems. Well, now as I mentioned, if you're thinking of it as an ecosystem, you can now advertise to your players on the web or on other channels, other platforms and drive them all right to your game from different places, which is huge. retargeting, attribution opens up all of that, right? In a way that had not been there before. I could go on and on, but strategically for your business, this is massive. One of the questions

that has come up is with what happened last week in the court ruling in the US, will that apply worldwide? I think you're seeing an equal force coming out of Europe that would help, you know, ensure that this is more of a global opportunity than just a a regional. This seemed to be really positive news for the mobile market. Mhm. Would you go along with that? Yeah, I think um really time times of the essence now. If you're a mobile game developer with an established product, you should implement this Apple tax dodge like right now. Uh because Apple is appealing the verdict. Mhm. I don't think it will get very far because if you're a fun guy like me and you've read the whole court document, 80 pages, I scanned some of it to be fair, but the judge is furious throughout like incandescent fury uh with Apple's behavior and I think it ends with her saying something like, "This is beyond argument. This is a

ruling, not a temporary injunction." So, the judge is furious. I don't think Apple really has a leg to stand on given the wealth of evidence in that court ruling. And also, you know, you've got a a huge developer community um out there who can quickly, you know, possibly in the next week or so, add this stuff into their games, dodge that 30%, and then if the judge somehow decides not to enforce this ruling, which is effective like right now, reversing, you know, putting the genie back in the bottle at that point is going to be really hard and will require Apple to sort clamp down on developers who have just followed the law and it's another bad really bad look for Apple um who which is or trade as this pantomine villain a lot of the time taking 30% being very restrictive about how it deals with developers on its platform and then for them to come back and like try and stop

try and take it back off developers it's going to be a really bad look for them um I think there will be news um at the uh Worldwide Developers Conference, WWDC. Um Apple holds this every June, I think. Um I think they have to address this problem at their developer conference uh this summer. Maybe they'll reduce the commission. Um maybe they'll um loosen up the rules in other ways, but yeah, I mean the I can't see this um you know that a lot of the Apple services revenue is App Store um game inapp purchase uh commission. So if that dips in the next quarter as a result of this brawling um you know shareholders will not be happy. Yeah. um Tim Cook has not handled this

well. You would have thought it would have they would have been better off like from the beginning setting their own. It is important to to state that this is this is Apple's self-inflicted wound, right? If they'd have complied with the court ruling that was made years ago properly and in good faith, we wouldn't be in this situation now. So, they've completely shot themselves in the foot and one of the one of the executives is actually up for potentially criminal proceedings for lying under oath. So, yeah, it's it's not not a good story for Apple. There's even a line in the court ruling that says uh Cook chose poorly or something like that that directly uh referencing Tim Cook, the CEO. So quite an ugly episode for the whole company and you know but it's ended in Tim Sweeney kind of doing a little victory dance and Fortnite potentially being on the back on the US app store by the time this podcast comes out. If you look on the

positive side of this growth in the games market overall when it includes the mobile market is relatively sluggish at the moment. There was the double digit growth years gone by seems to be over. they're going to get that's going to impact Apple's revenues and I think something like this the only way you're going to grow the games market through innovation new ideas new people coming in or old people trying new stuff and if you can make the margins better on these games if you can make companies more you know more profitable and those sort of things make it a little bit safer for them to do try new stuff that can boost the whole sector and that therefore will boost Apple I think I think obviously short term it's going to cause quite billions of dollars I suspect in their in their earnings impact but longer term it might stimulate a bit of growth in a market that is starting to slow down um and has slowed down in recent years. Yeah, I think Apple could benefit from this longer term if they embraced it rather than fought against it. But yeah, if they just stopped with this kind of panto villain kind of attitude that they seem to have adopted and really worked with developers and listened to developers and made the app store better

value, I don't think people would have a problem with that 30% if Apple was providing good value to game developers. Yeah. So maybe maybe we'll see something announced in June. And that's oh that's why Tim Sweeney um actually isn't going after consoles because in many respects you know consoles they they have very low margins on them. Console makers sell them at a loss. They mock them hard. They do a lot of things. Exactly. And which helps developers. So even though they take a 30% cut is like I think that's fair enough. Yeah. But maybe that will change in the future as well. That is our that is our final story. Neil has to run away. Uh uh thank you Neil for joining us today on this bumper episode of the game business show. For everyone watching at home uh listening at home, thank you for tuning in. We'll be back next week. We've got a Games Media special and obviously we'll be back with Art News and analysis show as well. Until then, thanks for tuning in.