Gennifer Hom

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Call of Duty

Call of Duty's Battle Pass competitive analysis

Helping define the next battle pass from benchmarking competitor systems

Company

Activision Blizzard

Timeline

Summer 2025 (12 weeks)

Role

UX Design Intern

Team

Live Ops Team

Tools

Microsoft Suite · Copilot · Figma

Skills

Synthesis & framework-building · Stakeholder alignment

While many of my projects are protected by an NDA, I am permitted to share my three-week process for the Battle Pass.

Context

What is a Battle Pass?

A Battle Pass is a seasonal reward system used in live-service games. As players play, they earn progress that unlocks rewards like character skins, weapons, and in-game currency, across a track that resets each season.

BACK

Most games offer a free tier and a paid tier, which makes the Battle Pass both a way to keep players coming back and one of a game's biggest sources of revenue. Because so much engagement and spending flows through it, how clearly players can read and navigate the pass has a direct impact on whether they keep playing.

Overview

Benchmarking four live-service Battle Passes to give Call of Duty a clear, prioritized path to a better progression experience.

The Battle Pass is one of the most-visited surfaces in Call of Duty, and it carries a tricky balance. It has to drive revenue while still feeling fair to players, two goals that often work against each other. Like most live-service teams, the studio regularly reviews player insights and analytics. My contribution was to bring a dedicated UX-focused breakdown of the experience itself through an outside-in lens. I looked into how players read, navigate, and emotionally interpret progression systems across competing games.

Due to NDA restrictions, some images have been blurred for confidentiality

Problem

When a player opens the Battle Pass, can they tell how far they've progressed, see what's worth playing for, and do they feel good about it?

Battle Passes have become increasingly complex, often at the expense of player clarity. Call of Duty's pass sits on the restrained end of the monetization spectrum which is a genuine strength for fairness. But "fair" doesn't automatically mean "clear," and the team had no structured answer to a simple question.

Without a shared UX framework for comparing progression systems across games, discussions around improvements could easily become subjective or fragmented.

A framework before critique

Comparing to define an objective framework

To make the findings comparable and credible, I defined the evaluation up front and applied it identically to every game, including ours.

Then I scored each layer through three lenses drawn from battle pass progression best practices

Balanced reward tracks (fairness and flexibility for free and paid players)
Accessible progress (does it reward participation over performance, and avoid burnout?)
Visible progress (can players see, understand, and feel motivated by where they are?)

I used this structure to help connect my observations

Then I scored each layer through three lenses drawn from battle pass progression best practices

Balanced reward tracks (fairness and flexibility for free and paid players)
Accessible progress (does it reward participation over performance, and avoid burnout?)
Visible progress (can players see, understand, and feel motivated by where they are?)

I used this structure to help connect my observations

Breaking it down

I learned the battle pass systems by playing them

To make the comparison legible at a glance, I built a matrix that plotted each game on two axes that actually matter to the player experience: how aggressive the monetization felt, and how clear and intuitive the system was.

I benchmarked Call of Duty against Fortnite, Marvel Rivals, and Apex Legends. These four passes genuinely had different philosophies: token-and-page, XP-and-page, multi-currency, and linear star-based.

What I found

Low-pressure pricing builds trust but hides value

Call of Duty's monetization is the most subtle of the four, which is why it feels fair. But that same subtlety made progress tracking feel opaque and the value of upgrades hard to read. The aggressive models (Marvel Rivals and Apex) had the opposite problem where there is clearer value, at the cost of players feeling pushed to spend.

1. Visibility, not generosity, drives momentum. 

The passes that felt best weren't the most generous, they were the most legible. Clear XP bars, high-contrast "ready to claim" cues, and forward pagination consistently created momentum, while disconnected progress signals and the absence of a persistent overview made long-term planning harder than it should be.

2. Small status decisions create outsized confusion. 

The claim-and-equip flow was a recurring offender. When unlocking, claiming, and equipping are split across too many card states or ambiguous side-by-side buttons, players think they've done something they haven't. The cleanest flows collapsed those steps and used strong visual confirmation, so an item was unmistakably yours.

3. Challenges only motivate when they live in the moment. 

The strongest systems wove missions into moment-to-moment play and the post-match recap, so progress felt connected to the action. Where challenges sat off in a separate menu, they did far less to drive engagement.

4. A great reward is wasted if players can't find the preview.

Reward previews are where excitement gets manufactured. Low-contrast or easily-missed entry points meant players never saw the items meant to pull them forward, while the best examples made previews prominent and let the reward sell itself.

From findings to recommendations

I recommended clarity mechanics while leaving out the aggressive monetization

I translated each pattern into a prioritized set of recommendations, organized by the same five layers and paired with specific takeaways for what we could adopt from each competitor and what to avoid.

The specific recommendations and proposed directions are withheld here for confidentiality. I'm glad to walk through the thinking and prioritization in an interview.

Reflection

Designing for stakeholders within the company

The biggest lesson was that the user isn't always who you're designing for. I started out building wireframes the way a product designer would. But the real audience was busy studio stakeholders who needed the core insight and a clear question, not a usability study. Once I led with the point of view instead of the process, the work landed.

.Hom

.Hom

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Call of Duty

Call of Duty

Context

What is a Battle Pass?

What is a Battle Pass?

Overview

Benchmarking four live-service Battle Passes to give Call of Duty a clear, prioritized path to a better progression experience.

Benchmarking four live-service Battle Passes to give Call of Duty a clear, prioritized path to a better progression experience.

Problem

When a player opens the Battle Pass, can they tell how far they've progressed, see what's worth playing for, and do they feel good about it?

When a player opens the Battle Pass, can they tell how far they've progressed, see what's worth playing for, and do they feel good about it?

A framework before critique

Comparing to define an objective framework

Comparing to define an objective framework

Breaking it down

I learned the battle pass systems by playing them

I learned the battle pass systems by playing them

What I found

Low-pressure pricing builds trust but hides value

Low-pressure pricing builds trust but hides value

From findings to recommendations

I recommended clarity mechanics while leaving out the aggressive monetization

I recommended clarity mechanics while leaving out the aggressive monetization

Reflection

Designing for stakeholders within the company

Designing for stakeholders within the company

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Gennifer Hom

Gennifer Hom