Call of Duty comes back to life as Xbox-360-era games get surprise update

Large numbers of players are swarming back to older Call of Duty games on Xbox 360 thanks to a recent update.

As spotted last week by Twitter user ZekcoFS, an update arrived for a number of older Call of Duty titles that fixed matchmaking. This included classics such Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Modern Warfare 2, Modern Warfare 3, and Black Ops 2. Now, it seems that quite a large number of players are returning to the games. As reported by CharlieIntel, Black Ops 2 managed to hit more than 10,000 players over the weekend on Xbox 360, and Modern Warfare 3 had over 7000 players, significant numbers for some now quite old games.

Prior to this apparent fix, anyone that tried to play a match of one of the older Call of Duty titles on Xbox 360 wouldn't be able to due to a supposed lack of players. This didn't make much sense, though, as certain game modes only needed as few as eight players, so it being completely impossible was odd. These older Call of Duty games are quite nostalgic for a lot of players, so it isn't a big surprise that they're getting a lot of players again, especially because they're backwards compatible on the Xbox Series X.

Currently what isn't clear is if a fix is coming for PS3 or PC players, both of which still seem to be experiencing problems. As it stands, it doesn't seem like a fix has been provided for either platform, so it's mostly just Xbox players that get to revisit the older games.

Call of Duty Twitch streamer ModernWarzone also made the claim that there were more people playing these old Call of Duty games over the weekend than there were playing Halo Infinite and Battlefield 2042 put together, though from our end it's difficult to determine what the player counts for each game are.

Over the weekend, Microsoft also announced that PlayStation finally agreed to a deal on Call of Duty, guaranteeing the games will stay on the latter for the time being.

Get codes from the VG247 eShop