Activision has officially confirmed that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare will not feature any sort of purchasable Season Pass. While Season Passes have been a series and industry staple in recent years, Activision is adopting a different business model. Instead of a Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Season Pass, the game will receive regular free content updates.
Why There Won’t be a Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Season Pass
With more games moving to the “games-as-a-service” model, paid DLC expansions are becoming less common. Instead, companies are shifting towards continuous content updates. While some games are combining this with a Season Pass, some have begun to phase passes out. Instead, the array of free content is used to keep players engaged and incentivise the sale of micro-transactions, etc. It seems that Activision has decided to make use of this model with Modern Warfare.
Of course, the lack of a Season Pass doesn’t mean a reduction in post-launch content. Speaking at the recent multiplayer unveiling event about the lack of a Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Season Pass, Design Director Joe Cecot said; “We just revealed, so it’s a little early to talk post-launch, but we can say that it will be a regular distribution of content. We have a very full post-launch schedule, because we want players to jump into our game and we want to keep them really busy with new content for a long time.”
As such, fans may be able to expect a post-launch schedule more akin to a game like Battlefield 5; i.e. continuous seasons of free content updates, weekly events, and so on, supported through the sale of wholly cosmetic micro-transactions. For a game like Call of Duty, Activision is likely to invest a great deal of their available resources into providing plenty of new content. Certainly, in both the short- and mid-term, at the very least.