Activision Shuts Down a Major Call of Duty Fan Project
Yesterday, on May 22nd, X Labs, a community mod project for the classic Call of Duty games was shut down by Activision. This follows a pattern of other cease and desist letters sent to various other Call of Duty mods like SM2. What X Labs did like other mods was provide private servers, as well as the ability to install other mods like advanced AI bots to play with. They also added additional community patches to the game years after they were abandoned by Activision.
If X Labs had only been hosting the mods on their site, that would have been one thing. However, it’s believed they were shut down specifically because they were hosting game files on their site. You could download full games as well as DLC content from X Labs. But they would also retweet sales on Twitter for buying the Call of Duty games legitimately on Steam.
X Labs also fixed a few major security issues within the original Call of Duty games. A remote code execution was found a few years ago that allowed people to run malicious code on anyone’s machine that was playing. The same exploit was found in many other games at the time this came out, including games like Team Fortress 2. The video below shows an example of what would happen when someone uses this exploit.
Activision claims to have fixed this in a patch, but it has not been verified if there is still a way to get around it. Modern Warzone, a beloved Call of Duty gaming news personality, expressed their concern with Activision’s C&D.
It comes to wonder how many other mods for Activision games will be taken down next. Many fans expressed concern about the mod Plutonium being nuked out of orbit sometime soon. I guess only time will tell what will happen next to the Call of Duty modding community.
