Free Upgrade from "Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare" on Xbox 360 to Xbox One

To accommodate customers who are upgrading from their well-worn Xbox 360 to a shiny new Xbox One this holiday season, Activision is extending a nice, one-time offer: You can upgrade your copy of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare—and your season pass and any other digitally purchased content—from the old console to the new one for free.

Unfortunately, this deal comes with a major caveat: You need to have purchased a digital copy of COD:AW on Xbox 360 to qualify. If you purchased the game on disc, you're out of luck.

The deal is valid through March 31, 2015, and of course all of your in-game progress and stats make it over to the new console. (There is a similar offer for moving between Sony PS3 and PS4, too, but you can't move between console families.)

The free upgrade does not remove COD:AW from your previous console, which is nice too.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is by far the best-selling video game title of 2014, with about 6 million copies sold as of the beginning of the month. (And its predecessor, Call of Duty: Ghosts is number 7, with 2.4 million in sales in 2014.) That's over triple the sales of Titanfall and almost double those of Destiny.

The game series is, of course, getting a bit tired, though I'd argue that multiplayer replay is the real value equation here, and that what Activision should be doing is forgetting the annual single player campaigns and release a Call of Duty Online subscription service that lets you play all of the maps from at least Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare on up, mix and match weapons, perks, and other in-game systems from all of those titles, and create gaming playlists.

But what do I know? The game sold 5.8 million copies so far. They must be doing something right.

Find out more about the special upgrade offer on the Call of Duty web site.