Publisher Activision Blizzard took to Twitter today to talk about questions they’ve been receiving regarding games entering Xbox Game Pass once the MSFT-ATVI deal is finalised (potentially this week). The company issued the following statement:
While we do not have plans to put Modern Warfare® III or Diablo IV into Game Pass this year, once the deal closes, we expect to start working with Xbox to bring our titles to more players around the world. And we anticipate that we would begin adding games into Game Pass sometime in the course of next year.
ATVI Twitter
While it’s not all too surprising that the company’s latest AAA slate wouldn’t hit Xbox Game Pass right away, we can likely still expect older games of theirs to hit the service once the deal closes. Per Windows Central’s Jez Corden:
After over a year and a half of twists and turns, looks like one of the largest gaming transactions in history will finally come to a end.
The only good new for me is that it’s finally over, hope MS will go back to 2018’s strategy and acquire a few small and kinda unknown studios, or maybe some support ones to help the first party studios with performance or with PC ports.
I can’t think of any single Activision title im interested on being on GP, i bought D4 on early access and it’s just a fine game, plus it’ll probably rely on it’s expansions which won’t be on GP so…
CoD i am done with that saga already but i’m glad it’ll help the Xbox brand a lot.
D2:R would be good tho, but the rest, meh
After the deal closes, Phil makes the final decision when those games go into gamepass.
Absent any other solid info (I’m disregarding the Acti. Tweet as a PR keep buying over the holiday period thing or contractual limitations on those two biggies) I would say we should assume this will follow the same format as the Bethesda acquisition. Where we will see a number of older titles added pretty much straight away with that list expanding over time and a post closing statement that as an Xbox first party all new acti blizz games will come to game pass day 1.
Yeah, it would surprise me if nothing gets added this year. We still got a good part of October left and then two more months.
Hope that’s PR speak for the games will actually be on XBox this year
Don’t believe everything you read.
I mean nobody expected new COD in gamepass anyway.
I can’t imagine Diablo 4 is selling well enough that it would be a financial loss to put it on gamepass but maybe it’s to do with the expansions model and them needing to work that out?
Don’t know but as wit Bethesda these things don’t all happen instantly anyway.
MW3 isn’t coming but everything else should be there day 1. Xbox dropped their cloud push like a bad habit so it’s not like they’re going to hold out until phone controls are available.
Then again, maybe the metrics from the Bethesda dump showed that drip feeding would have given the individual games better engagement.
As someone who already owns Diablo IV and is going to purchase MWIII regardless I’d honestly rather they drip feed Activision/Blizzard’s back catalogue so I actually have time to work through the games I’d like to play.