The “Call of Duty” company Activision Blizzard is currently taking action against fan projects that keep old CoD games alive. This causes a lot of trouble in the community.
Call of Duty is one of the largest and most successful game series in the world. There has been a new title every year since 2005. The current Modern Warfare 2 once again broke records in terms of sales figures on the first weekend.
However, the current state of the CoD games is not the point here. There are other issues that are currently weighing on the community.
Activision Blizzard is currently taking rigorous action against server operators who keep the servers of old CoD games alive as part of fan projects. But the reactions to it are bad and in the end the franchise may even harm itself.
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Fan servers are suddenly closed after years
What fan projects are you talking about? It started last week. On May 17, the operators of the “sm²” project announced on Twitter that the project would be abandoned (via twitter.com).
A CoD shooter had been built here for several years, which used the CoD MW2 2009 engine and was fed with many maps and weapons from the entire CoD series. It wasn’t until April that they switched to the engine of the CoD MW 2009 remaster.
Now “X Labs” got it too. This project included different servers from old CoD games, such as Advanced Warfare from 2014 or CoD Ghosts from 2013.
Tweet translation: “Today we received a cease and desist letter on behalf of Activision Publishing regarding the ‘X Labs’ project. We will comply with this order and will finally shut down all operations. Thank you everyone for the years of support.”
These projects use copyrighted content, owned by Activision Blizzard, for their own purposes. The projects know this and therefore usually give in straight away. Activision protects its rights here.
However, the players are less insightful.
How are the players reacting? The mood is charged, the reactions have rarely been so clear. There’s always a lot of complaining about Call of Duty, which is part of the shooter’s community feeling. But
It was the biggest topic in the community on Twitter today, the hashtag “#FuckActivision” was shared hundreds of times and many users are currently tweeting about the topic. It’s often about another project that could now be coming to an end – Plutonium Project.
Users also vent their anger in the Call of Duty sub-Reddit. One thread with almost 1,000 upvotes and over 350 comments discusses the closure, and many didn’t mince words (via reddit.com).
However, the discussion here is not only about how bad many users find the decision to attack the servers now. It’s also about how this development could harm the franchise and many players.
Why could the CoD hurt? The problem is the servers of the old games, which can be controlled via Steam, for example. Many are cheater-infested and hardly playable.
Example CoD: Advanced Warfare. There hasn’t been an update since 2015. There have been reports of players compromising the security of their systems by starting matches in multiplayer. You can catch malware, there are dozens of reports about it on Reddit (example via reddit.com).
That’s why fans say: The elderly CoD shooters are finally dying. The server projects were the last surefire ways to relive the old CoDs as they used to be – sometimes even better.
However, copyright is also an important part of gaming. But also dealing with it sensitively: Leading YouTuber says about Zelda, Nintendo is killing him – 28 videos with 55 million views have already been blocked