Some long-awaited classic Activision-Blizzard games just appeared on the Microsoft Store, could Xbox be getting another Game Pass injection?
Some older Call of Duty games have new listings on the Microsoft Store, so what's going on?
- Three older Call of Duty games have appeared on the Microsoft Store.
- This has previously occurred for Activision games joining Xbox Game Pass.
- Spyro Reignited Trilogy and more have already joined Xbox Game Pass.
It's possible we'll be seeing more Activision Blizzard games added to Microsoft's gaming subscription service in the coming weeks.
Three older Call of Duty games have appeared on the Microsoft Store, with new listings for Call of Duty + United Offensive, Call of Duty 2, and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Historically, we've seen Activision Blizzard games get Xbox PC or Microsoft Store listings ahead of the games being added to Xbox Game Pass. Sometimes it's been a matter of weeks, other times it's several months.
That was the case with the Spyro Reignited Trilogy, which was first spotted with a store page back in April but was added to Xbox Game Pass in November. No matter the timing, these recent listings point to a drop of games for Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass subscribers happening at some point in the coming months.
Xbox continues to slowly integrate Activision Blizzard
Microsoft finalized the acquisition of Activision Blizzard back in October 2023, and it's been a process as Activision Blizzard is integrated into the larger Xbox umbrella.
While things were a bit slow at first, the last couple of months have seen ever-so-slightly increasingly frequent drops of Activision Blizzard titles, including the aforementioned Spyro Reignited Trilogy, Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, Diablo 4, StarCraft Remastered + StarCraft 2: Campaign Collection, and Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2023) is the only legacy Call of Duty game to be added to the service so far — Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, a much newer game, launched day one across the service on Oct. 25, 2024 — but based on these listings, that'll likely be changing in the future.
There's a lot of back-end work going on no matter the game, and many of these games still don't technically support Xbox Play Anywhere, an excellent feature that's been a staple of the Xbox first-party lineup across Xbox Game Studios and Bethesda Softworks. Meanwhile, Blizzard's games are using Battle.net instead of the Xbox PC app, and Battle.net itself is being expanded beyond Activision Blizzard titles.
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We're also still waiting to see Raven Software's criminally-underrated first-person shooter Singularity added to the service, as it's been some months after a Microsoft Store listing first popped up. It would be nice to see some of these games get Xbox Series X|S versions in a revival of Microsoft's backward compatibility efforts, but based on how Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled wasn't ported to PC when it was added to Xbox Game Pass, I'm not exactly holding my breath.
Samuel Tolbert is a freelance writer covering gaming news, previews, reviews, interviews and different aspects of the gaming industry, specifically focusing on Xbox and PC gaming on Windows Central. You can find him on Twitter @SamuelTolbert.