Image: Activision
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II launched in full on October 28 on consoles and PC via Steam and Battle.net. Initially, like many Steam games, it supported the service’s Family Sharing feature. Yesterday though, people looking to share a single copy of the latest CoD on Steam won’t be too happy, as Activision shut down the service just three days after launch.
Steam Family Sharing has been around for a while. The service does what the name suggests: you can share a single digital copy of a game with up to five people you select, usually family or close friends. The service has its own limits and restrictions, such as not allowing two individual accounts to play the same game at the same time. Although Modern Warfare II shipped with this feature enabled, a SteamDB entry reveals that as of October 31st, the game was retroactively excluded from sharing features.
Kotaku has reached out to Activision for comment.
The reaction across the community has been a mix of confusion at the time, speculation that it was done to curb cheating issues, and frustration from those who planned to use the feature, especially to save money and avoid the purchase of multiple copies of a $70 game.
“I own the game on Steam and work. I can’t play as much as my little cousin and neither of us want to play on the same account because we have our own level, classes, friends, etc. reads one comment on Reddit. “This it sucks” begins another “my nephew plays MW2 while I’m away at work via family share. The game is too expensive to justify another cop right now.”
Others express that they would have been fine with sharing services disabled, but would have preferred it not to have been done at the last minute, after many have spent money on the game. “This should have been a move made before it was released, before people left [past] the 2 hour limit. […] The only way I justified this game at $101 CAD was if my younger brother (who was more excited than me) could also play ON THE SAME PC,” reads one such review.
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Some speculate that the decision to get support for this feature has to do with Activision’s strict anti-cheat policies for CoD, since in theory the feature could be used to bounce between smurf accounts. Although MWII includes strict anti-cheat measures, such as requiring a contract-based phone number for verification, as well as kernel-level software. That said, Team Ricochet, CoD’s anti-cheat team, has been transparent with the decisions they’ve made to keep cheaters out of the game.
If disabling Family Sharing on Steam was part of those efforts, Team Ricochet has yet to make a statement about it.