As a senior network services engineer and architect who handles large cloud service deployments, I would like to address why a company like Activision-Blizzard very likely won't ever release the server software for this game. Strap in, this is a DEEEEEP subject! It's the cloud integration, multiplayer service complexity, and good old greed. Even if you didn't have matchmaking issues for battle-royal to work around (and host), the infrastructure the game server is coded against is likely locked down and heavily dependent on other services that aren't easily affordable (or understandable) to average players trying to "just host a CoD server". Firstly, it's often hosted on a multiplayer network stack designed to be served by a middle-man who provides an API running on top of AWS, GCloud, or Azure. The game is coded against said API. Users looking to host their own servers will not be interested in paying the licensing fees to use this API and its hosting solutions. Secondly, even if this wasn't the case, the deployment of the servers is wrapped up in arbitrary (read: rushed out the door) cloud deployment tooling and configurations that are a bizarre pile of load balancing, kubernetes pods, auto-scaler policies, proxying, SSL certifications, region management, etc. In short, it's "da cloud" and it's far from simple to port this infrastructure off of their dedicated setup spanning multiple regional networks over to "GamerBud67's private server VM" on Vultr. Thirdly, they have no incentive to do this work, share the details, or allow others to get into this space. Have you ever noticed any time you want to add multiplayer to a game it's always locked behind some "pay us to use our multiplayer stack on Unity" or you get pushed to use "Unreal approved multiplayer services"? That's because the BIG thing in gaming is multiplayer service games. They don't want indie developers coming in and easily disrupting this gold mine. If it was easy to set up these scalable cloud services by say, an indie reverse engineering a battle royal private server software, they would have even more competition than they already do from their AAA rivals. Let me repeat that one for the folks in the back. The multiplayer server infrastructure is the sword they wield in the gaming market. If you are a blacksmith, you don't share your forging techniques, you tell them to buy your swords and keep coming back for upgrades. The last thing you want is another blacksmith setting up shop to compete with you. Lastly, why would they release the game with multiplayer support to the players? So those players can go host their own private servers and continue to keep playing the original Warzone? Nah, they WANT you all to switch to Warzone 2 so you have to start over, buy new battle passes, in-game items, etc. There is monetary incentive to ending the original and forcing you all over to the new lottery shooter palooza. The fact it also cuts costs by not running servers for the old game is just a bonus. Sufficed to say, it's going to likely be a LONG time before any of these major players seriously consider letting us host our own servers. It will be when it doesn't boost sales or hurt their IP or endanger the technical advantage they have in the market. It is far more likely some dedicated group of hacker gamers will reverse engineer the whole system, similar to how we got private version of WoW servers, but that takes a lot of time and effort and only happens for games that stick around (which is not the case with these rapidly being replaced shooter games). Source: I build these kinds of services and license them as a SaaS product as well as provide the code open source to whoever wants to use them. They're so complicated (by necessity for our scale of product) that companies pay us literally thousands of dollars a month to "just do it for them" even though the code is freely available. It's not worth even trying to manage your own infra, so they pay us. Large scale games services are the same, all modern multiplayer service-based game development uses these same technologies because it's the way it is done. If you made it down here, thanks for reading my long explanation. I wanted to share this so folks can begin to understand the herculean task it is hosting and running modern cloud hosted game services across the globe. Thank you!

Activision going on a killstreak on their own games.

rip to all the people who spent money on this game that are losing their skins. Feels like they could have done this a lot better

Correction, you're at the mercy of the publishers, not the developers. I'm sure the actual people that made it wouldn't want to shut down their baby after just a few years.

It speaks to the short life of mainstream games nowadays. As always folks support indie devs

You could play the first warzone, but since they ditched the game and apparently all three of the previous games were broken horribly, I would easily assume hackers are now just really rampant

It would be cool if they allowed what Fortnite does. There’s multiple Fortnite projects that run live service games of the old versions of the game. Fortnite seems to endorse it and it’s a lot of fun to play. It would be cool, and this would also allow players to go and play verdansk, rebirth, 1984, etc. would be really cool for warzone

It's disgusting how they just kill games once they've made their money. In dota 2 or csgo or apex or fortnite i know my skins will last until the game actually dies when no one is playing it. but replacing the game yourself and just basically deleting all the skins the players bought... I am speechless.

modern gaming proving yet again that all we ever needed was tf2

This is one of the most underrated and underappreciated reasons that Minecraft is the best-selling game in the world. Letting players host their own servers and build their own profit models on top of your game has issues, but will cause your game to live on literally forever.

This is why it makes sense to never invest emotionally and financially in these sort of AAA projects anymore, the companies have lost touch with what's important to gamers. Hopefully games such as that low-poly clone of battlefied will have the integrity to continue to serve the needs of multiplayer FPS gaming and not succumb to this greed trap. Small budget games are the only hope. And of course long-running games like Warframe.

I'm fairly confident that the majority of players still playing warzone 1 instead of warzone 2 are not going to start playing warzone 2 after the warzone 1 shuts down.

This game is pretty historic honestly. It feels wrong to just delete it. Not because of anything it did particularly brilliantly, but because of when it came out and when we all played it. My memories of life during the pandemic and Warzone are permanently linked.

Its so sad how the game died. So many good memories and moments it created for me...

I left a comment on TheActMan's video talking about this: The problem is incentives. It always comes down to incentives. What incentive does Activision have to allow players to continue playing the game without feeding into the constant churn of players necessary for their matchmaking and ongoing microtransaction platform? The players do not have leverage, they are not sufficiently organized, and whenever dedicated fans try to make separate free modded clients, they get Cease and Desist letters in the mail. Again, it is a pet peeve of mine whenever I hear someone say anything to the effect of "Why can't they just do... ?" or in this video's case: "Is it really that hard to let people run their own community servers?" It's not that it's hard. The difficulty is irrelevant. It's that it represents a loosening of control on Activision's part, and to that greasy goblin Bobby Kotick, that's not acceptable.

I was never even really into war zone 😂

Good job on the video, and explanation!

You can't stop the signal. Whoever can make it, SHOULD make it. The community will keep it going through smoke and mirrors after activision's feeble and and ball-less attempt, whatever it may be, to "shut it down"

I haven't played Warzone 1 since 2 released, but I've heard it still had a dedicated community. Many people who didn't agree with the movement nerfs supposedly just never moved over to the new game. If Activision wouldn't have shut down every extra game mode and deleted the Warzone 1 store, it probably could have been making more than enough money to keep the servers up. But in the end, Activision doesn't want "enough money." They want all the money they can get out of their yearly game.

The solution, honestly, is to try and avoid any live service games that you know is run by a company who'll krump 'em after a few years. This stuff is why I now despise games like Overwatch or Quake Champions with the live service, it's yours until they just say "no".

This is the way I could save a game like this if I were the developer. First, allow the creation of community servers, and givin tools to mount their own servers to users. Second: make the las updated build of the game, the las officil update capable of running with these community servers. third: once that version exist, encapsulate every single profile of every single player in the game, and make it avalaible to download for each player, a few months before the official servers shutdown. These profiles will be encapsulated inside encripted files. fourth: include built within the last updated version of the game, a key that (in combination with the downloaded plarye profile) unlocks every cosmetic purchased for any specific player profile that is loaded in the game. This process could be done by the combination of the player's profile + the last updated version all in binary, and then a HASH operation. So, when a player load a player's profile, the game will check if this same operation result in the key storaged within the game, to ensure the player profile is real. That way you coul theorethycaly keep your skins that you bought, and keep playing the game on community servers. (Sorry for my bad english, I tried my best to explain my idea)

Dammit... My little comrade gun setup is going away.

the cycle: frontier is shutting down also

I swear there should be a law that makes these companies either care and *PROVIDE* their product (I'm looking at you NINTENDO) or if they don't want to support their products it should be able to have community ran servers or patches/mods

Fission Mailed we'll get them next time

the same thing has happened to one of my favourite games called Echo VR, meta shutting it down while it still had years to grow, and not letting community members host servers

Activision has hit a low

They're going to remaster it in like 5 years and cash in on the wave of nostalgia for something that never really had to go away in the first place.

Man the fun time I had with my friends

MW2 was first and my last COD i bought. They're going to release MW3 this year or so and one year from now they will close MW2 servers... also they lied about not releasing new cod and changed their mind.

I think making a 3rd Party Client with custom servers would be a good option. Certainly not easy to do, but when done right there is nothing Activision can do against that.

It could also work on peer to peer network and skip having servers

This game got 3 years updatethey said. Meanwhile, this year, was announced a "new"cod

They're assuming those players will play warzone 2 but if they were willing to play a 4 year old game that was no longer being updated just because it offered an experience they enjoyed more, I doubt they'll go play warzone 2 suddenly because it plays very differently and doesn't offer what they like about war zone 1. I wonder why they think this decision will make them more money then just continuing to support warzone one and two when engagement is such an important metric to consider these days.

I think that the same thing goes for CSGO but nobody noticed, I'm pretty sure that they'll replace the game with cs 2 in steam and you can't get access to it unless you run it outside of it, but at least CSGO has community servers, also new players couldn't download it unless it became uploaded to some website

For something called "live service" it sure does kill a lot of games

absolutely tragic, honestly

Oh my god, it's been four years.

This is the exact reason I do not play live service games. Publishers are beholden to their shareholders / quarterly earnings reports and thus will never do what is best for the community or the game and people should think about whether they want to support this with their money.

And this is why I we’ll never spend money on cod again because it’ll be gone half a year after the next game launches

This crap is directly fueling the rise of so many indie studios. These live service things make a lot of money when they dominate the market but by nature they require people to spend a LOT of time playing them and being really invested. What this means is that people can't be "into" 5 of them at once, or get "into" a new one every month. To justify the ongoing costs the studios need to snag a consumer base with years-long (decades long if you're GTA) periods of regular playtime commitments. Anything else is quickly abandoned since microtransactions only make money when you have a large enough base, and the games almost invariably rely on user-interaction for their content in one way or another. Basically, if the game isnt a huge success immediately, it will fade very quickly and be abandoned. This is also why the studios and publishers are pushed into quickly culling anything that isn't a megahit - they need those users to move to their next game to have another shot at making the megahit. There aren't enough hours in their customers' days for the industry to sustain a large ecosystem, so there can only be a handful of successful live service games at any given time. This obviously leaves a huge number (I'm gonna say a majority) of the customer base completely unserved. If you're not into a game of the type that is currently of the few megahits, you're out of luck. Major studios and publishers all chase the big money all the time, and have completely abandoned every niche market. That has given completely free reign for small indie developers to fill 90% of the market with quality niche titles. Awesome.

I don’t know much about this stuff, but would it be possible to duplicate the game’s files and then release it on a browser or a game engine so people could download it from an old player?(if it wasn’t for copyright)

Ladies and gentlemen brace yourselves as I present to you: Modern Gaming

The companies always had right to closed the server of any older games mainly to "save money and budget" from my thought of this in general. Which was understandable inducing for those who too rejecting to moved on, but because we also living under the rock of Chinese media market standard even in video game as well, it can't be help but to keep seeing in sorrow over the older titles (and declined titles as well) getting pull into the unwanted storage while the companies' group keep forcing us to sticking our glues into the current titles instead

Blackout sitting around like 😈

i didn't even know warzone 1 was still playable

Yeah I’ve tried but I can’t get into a warzone one match. It’s scary how big some games are for years but how they can just transform into a ghost town in a matter of weeks.

hopefully someone will put it on the internet archive and someone else can crack it and make a server

i just thought warzone 2 was an update i didnt know it was a new game

Big F for those who spent money on it

This is why I never bother buying live service games anymore. There is no point in investing on temporary games.

Notice the trend of owning nothing. In entertainment you dont own the music you pay for, the games you pay for, the movies you pay for... In life you dont (and prolly never will) own the roof you pay for, you wont own the car you pay for if something unexpected happen and you can no longer afford to pay for said car payments. You dont own the fruits of your education, at best youll get an entry level job that pays depressing wages compared to the years you put to educate yourself for said jobs. You dont own the fruits of your labor either, that belongs to your paperpusher of a boss and you'll like it that way cuz god forbid having workplace democracy. Boi i sure do love capitalism

People can avoid the games of publishers/developers that take anti-user actions. Which is actually, the best way to fix these games in the first place, because if their player base declines for this reason, it would force them to imporve the user experience. But alas, not all players are this invested in keeping the industry health.

I hope they port Verdansk to Warzone 2.0 someday. DMZ on Verdansk would be fantastic

I future I will make my own free to play warzone like game that pormots fast movement

And I thought companies would learn from Sega's mistake with phantasy Star online 2.

Didn't even know there was a 2 lol

I quit wz2 to play og warzone, and i straight up couldn't go back to wz2, i am saddened to see this go

This is what I called. I knew when they said that skins wouldn't transfer to Warzone 2 that they'd gut Warzone 1 as quick as they could. They only kept it playable for the PR.

I played Warzone 1. I did not play Warzone 2. Knowing that my cosmetics and time grinding weapons and attachments makes me want to play the new one even less. For what? To do it all over again when WZ3 comes out? No thanks.

If this means I can finally play modern warfare without downloading a 120gb update I'll be really fucking happy.

It's amazing to me how the gaming industry is now full of tyrannical companies that are so obsessed with profits compared to even just ten years ago where the space was way more about developer passion and a bigger focus on creating enjoyable games over extorting gamers for money

Big L Activision

Game studio version of apple basically making sure their old Iphones stop working

History is going to be lost with this

never played it but while it hurts to lose time invested it's just part of life, shut down or not, there was a lot of people that was never going to come back and play, like many games in my past, even without ingame purchases, you just forget about them.

This seems like smtg that will be in Congress sometime soon.

protests online don't do anything. because it doesn't affect their money flow or their day-to-day. This is Activision after all. I would say a proper in-person protest at Activision HQ would have the most likely to succeed but that requires a lot of dedication from the fan-base that I don't think enough people could follow through with. So, Warzone 1 is just kinda just doomed and that makes me realize that I should never ever buy skins for COD games again. That's where I drew the line, taking things away from me that I paid for. I strongly advise everyone to do the same and stop buying skins for COD games indefinitely.

first, they took out rebirth island and Fortunes Keep then the item shop, and only left Caldera they purposely were trying to kill the game when Warzone 2.0 came out with that move I figured it was only a short time til this happened on a plus note if you own mw 2019 the skins and stuff will still work in its normal multiplayer its still stupid they couldn't figure out a way to keep the br up tho.

I really want regulators to step in. With the influx of Allways-Online Games there need some sort of mechanism. Warzone1 maybe a lost cause, but there are other - Singleplayer - Games that are unplayable because of server shutoffs. And i do believe that Activision should get a fine because the term "buy" is heavely misleadeng when you dont buy it, more rent it.

Usually I'm up in arms over publishers/studios closing servers down even rather small games, but this one I'm pretty neutral about. Same as you I just assumed that they moved on to Warzone 2.0 and in the process shut down the first one then, similar to Overwatch "2". This time though I find it much more justified because it really is more of a update that necessitated a new game for sake of the graphics and whatnot so having both up would be redundant. That and the fact that Warzone had been getting stale long before Warzone 2.0 which I believe it to be a superior product anyway. Or at least those were my initial thoughts before thinking about the fact skins don't transfer and the like has me rather upset again as it further reinforces this toxic behavior that befalls live service games.

What does this mean for the MW client? Will this effectively shut down MW19 servers as well? Or will they remove the Warzone files from MW (finally)?

they're following Destiny 2 and just straight up removing entire parts of a game

i would try to reinvent it

It's important to recognize that condensing players into one game makes matchmaking and finding games in general way better, which is the most important thing for a multiplayer game.

Exactly why I stopped playing call of duty games after bo3 & the "space one"! And I've been playing since the very first call of duty!! Was a loyal fan, with all the titles and map packs up til then but Activision became all about money, microtransactions, and broken mechanics / gameplay etc! They showed they just don't care about the game or gamers, corporate greed took over, no point in wasting my time or money on them anymore!

I would just expand what they already have. I have noticed that they have named warzone 2.0 just Call of Duty. So what I would do is just integrate that map from wz1 to wz2, as well as let all skins that people had in mw1 in mw3. Also I would make multiplayer free, so every body like search and destroy, dm, tdm, etc. completely free. Only thing that I would make not free is campaign. There is no reason to pay 70$ and also have battlepass...That is the whole reason why BF and COD are failling. They are money hungry. Make MP free, make that in MP you have every skin that you aquired in previous games and make new MW franchise fully connected. Basically same as new Hitman franchise. Like we all know that difference between MW1 and MW3 is in shading... I wholeheartedly prefer MW1 over both MW2 and MW3

i just hope this doesn't happen with csgo when cs2 comes out

Bobby Kotick is a concerning individual.

Rip cod 2003 - 2023

I understand they're migrating to a new engine, but in that same regard, CSGO just did a major engine switch. Same items, same game, same service, players have trust because they didn't just have CSGO around for 4 years, move on to CS2, and say "forget it" to aspects of the previous game. If COD series could stop for a moment and make something worth sticking around for a really long time as a live-service game, I'd say they'd only see more benefit.

I understand that they can push you to sign an EULA that gives you no rights over the digital assets that you unlock, however it won't make me happy. Yes they took my money, but they lost my trust in them as decent developers. I don't care how much time they spent on making CoD 2 I am not going to play it. To me og Warzone was not just a random battleroyal, I made lots of memories there and I want to play on that map specifically. It is not a question of money or subscirptions and if giga companies won't understand this, they will eventually see people stride away from their games. Devs can't force me to play a game and enjoy it. However they do have the right to cancel their digital assets at will. I have the right to not pay them a single penny too. I will adhere to this.

This is as expected. The developers would love keep their games up but in end of the day it all hangs on the publishers. But nonetheless Warzone was an absolute blast and made most fond memories on it.

The only solution to this would be if the source code and assets got leaked. Then a mod team could disable the live service shenanigans and add P2P servers. Of course this is illegal, complicated to do and might change the experience for players, but has been done before with success.

Never cared about Warzone and Battle Royale in general, but i am quite anxious about MW2019 multiplayer, it's still quite fun.

I think publishers should allow for 3rd parties to host their own servers after the official ones shut down. As long as the guys running those servers don't take money for it. I can absolutely understand, why publishers don't want random people profiting from their work. My guess is the devs themselves would love to see their work live on.

Activision is speedrunning bankrupt, same as Bud light and Disney were trying to do. There no reason to shut warzone 1, meanwhile both cod1, cod2 and cod4 multiplayer still alive by the community.

Can you carry over WZ1 stuff to WZ2?

I will always have good memories of wz, but I knew for a fact that it wouldn’t last a long while. As soon as that I iw8ship “glitch” had ran its course and the “new” mw2 had been announced I was sure I’d lose access to those cosmetics. I am having fun it DMZ, though Activision and those associated with them seem to be going in a downward spiral so to say.

This whole thing has me feeling mixed, during the whole WZ1 period (MW2019, CW, Vanguard) i keep hearing people booing the game, complaining about it, making a plethora of negative reviews, wishing the game is dead and then make the next game. Now the game is being shut down and everyone misses it. XDefiant had this issue as well, when it was reveal everyone hated it, then on gameplay reveal everyone loved it, are people really just unable to make up their minds?

Just another reason live service games are rarely ever worth paying for.

I thought we were talking about some game from like 2010 getting the plug pulled but this game was released only 4 years ago!? I’ve bought milk that lasts longer than some of these games.

if they bring verdansk back to wz2 i might play

took too long to cue before w2 so idrc (Australia Servers)

I still play Day of Defeat which came out in 2000 and was retail released in 2003. I couldn't imagine how mad I would be if Valve forcibly killed it. I know there is still a large Counter-Strike 1.6 community as well.

2 words: Games as a Service.

I still don't get why they just didn't make 2.0 and update of Warzone 1

What Activision and other companies don't realize is that by doing this, they're not *forcing* everyone to go play the latest installment of their game. If anything, they're turning away people who would otherwise continue supporting the product and spending money on it, and also pissing away the goodwill of players who will now wonder when Warzone 2 is going to be shut down. I wish gamers would not just sit down and let companies do this to them and instead find alternatives in the indie scene or whathaveyou. BattleBit Remastered is a great example of a very fun alternative to Warzone and I think it deserves more attention than anything that Activision is going to crap out at this point.

we got to save the original warzone, my idea is a boycot

I really hope this means they remove it from MW. But knowing Activision they're going to still force us to have a 100gb game installed to play another game.