Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 launches with eyes on Game Pass

It has been eagerly anticipated, but this year's Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 has finally dropped for gamers to get stuck into.

The Call of Duty (CoD) series is one of the best-selling in history with more than 425 million lifetime sales and has made billions of dollars.

But this latest edition comes with a bit of a difference, with it being available straight away to subscribers of Microsoft’s Game Pass service - a first for a game of this size.

It means those with the existing Netflix-style subscription do not need to pay anything extra to play.

Game Pass, like Sony's rival PlayStation Plus service, lets Xbox and PC players play hundreds of video games for a monthly fee.

Earlier this year, Microsoft raised prices for all subscribers and added a tiered system.

As it's the first mainline CoD game to be released since Microsoft completed its takeover of maker Activision Blizzard in the gaming industry's biggest ever deal, there's naturally a lot of focus on this approach.

Some experts feel it could bring more subscribers to the Game Pass service, but at the expense of actual game sales, with its true impact only being revealed in the coming months.

CoD content creator BennyCentral feels Game Pass is "one of the biggest elements this year".

"The fact that it's going to give people so much access, whether they're playing on Xbox or they're playing on PC, they're going to be able to play the full game as part of that subscription," he says.