Activision seems to have taken some surprising actions against Call of Duty hackers. But this time, these hackers are not cheaters or cheat sellers.
As shared in the Call of Duty Fandom forums, various unofficial Call of Duty clients have been shut down after receiving cease and desist messages from Activision.
It all started with SM2, a client based on the Call of Duty Modern Warfare Remastered engine. SM2 was still in development, but the team intended to release the client free when it was ready.
On May 17, the SM2 Twitter account shared this message:
“Today, a team member received a Cease & Desist letter on behalf of Activision Publishing in relation to the sm² project. We are complying with this order and shutting down all operations permanently. Thank you all for your support over the past 2 years.”
Some of SM2 work was put into X Labs, another fan project that set up clients for Call of Duty Modern Warfare, Call of Duty Ghosts, and Call of Duty Advanced Warfare, named iW4X, iW6X, and S1X, respectively. Unlike SM2, fans were already using X Labs’ clients, but we’ll get back to that later.
In a tweet from yesterday, X Labs shared this message:
“Today, we have received a Cease & Desist letter on behalf of Activision Publishing in relation to the X Labs project. We are complying with this order and shutting down all operations permanently. Thank you all for your support over the years.”
Subsequently, BOIII is a client for Call of Duty Black Ops III associated with X Labs, possibly sharing some code or developers. Maurice Heumann, who was associated with both projects, shared this update about BOIII:
“We have received a Cease & Desist letter on behalf of Activision Publishing in relation to the X Labs project. Because of that, we are also going to shut down BOIII. Thank you all for your support.”
As noted in this Fandom forum update, this leaves Plutonium and H1 as the only Call of Duty fan clients for now.
Before you render judgements on these fan projects as somehow amounting to piracy, you need to know something. As reported in this TechCrunch profile from last February, these fans made these clients because they were addressing an issue that Activision was not addressing.
Namely, old games like Call of Duty Black Ops III’s official servers were overridden with hackers, causing havoc in gameplay and also creating the potential for real harm, as hackers could view player IP.
In this report, Maurice Heumann explained that these clients were reverse engineered and were designed in such a way that they were avoiding any legal issues in relation to the code. They even added features not found in the original game.
This interview also notes that the one thing the team did not reverse engineer were the patches to make their clients secure too. Ironically, it was likely these patches that made them vulnerable to C&Ds.
Activision has yet to share an official statement on the matter, but even with the matter of protecting IP rights in mind, this seemed too harsh an action from Activision.
It’s likely these fans would have wanted to work with Activision on a solution to fix these games themselves. We will follow up on this story if new details emerge.
