Not using the Activision games to sell GP is a bizarre one.
I suppose the question becomes: To whom
are they going to sell it? Most everyone who wants Game Pass already has it. Last estimate I read last year was something between 30-35M people are Game Pass subscribers. Even if every single Xbox One owner (~58M) and every single Xbox Series owner (~28M) bought Game Pass — pretending for a moment there’s no overlap between those two groups — they’d still fall short of the 100M subs they projected by 2027/2028.
Game Pass is unlikely to grow in any meaningful way even if they suddenly had COD, Diablo 4, and a bunch of other ABK games on it.
One other point I’d argue is that it wouldn’t cannibalize
just the Xbox side. They’d also be cannibalizing multiplatform sales. If you were to put a game like Diablo 4 up on Game Pass, and I, as a multiplatform gamer, have access to both platforms and subscriptions, I certainly wouldn’t buy the game on PlayStation since I could play it “free” over on Xbox. That is a
completely lost sale.