Infinity Ward screws PC gamers royally.

Note: This may be a bit of hyperbole given that no one truly knows what’s going on just yet. Time will tell. And soon — the game’s scheduled to come out in less than a month.

Update. Things are continuing to unwind it seems. FourZeroSheep posted an explanation of what the dedicated server-less system would be like. At this point it’s rocking nearly 3,100 comments. That petition I linked to below is now at nearly 130,000 signatures (whether or not online petitions mean squat is another story). The forum continues to fill up with ill will toward IWNET. Humorously, both CoD4 and WaW server admins have been changing their server names to reflect their thoughts on the matter.

It came to light yesterday that Infinity Ward is doing something crazy with multiplayer for the PC version of Modern Warfare 2. Rather than going with the usual dedicated server setup of most games (including CoD4), they’re apparently pushing out this system called IWNet or IW.NET or something equally lame. Basically, it will be a closed system that Infinity Ward themselves control in order to wrangle the multiplayer community. It’s kind of like Epic using GameSpy as the server browser for UT3… only a lot more central and (very possibly) a lot worse.

Bash and Slash conducted an interview with Infinity Ward sheep Rob Bowling. Here’s some of the things they found out:

General

• IW partnering through Steam is what you will see in the future. Match-making is not through Steam, but IW.NET is run in conjunction with Steam.
• GSP’s will no longer be renting out servers.
• No PunkBuster. VAC will be used as an anti-cheat.
• Retail distribution: Pre-orders will get a disk. Or you could order from Steam.
• DLC may now need to be paid for – not confirmed [but, of course, will definitely be true].
• Piracy was only a small reason for going to IW.NET – not the whole reason [obviously not a small reason].

Clans

• No more clan [i.e. dedicated] servers. Private matches via IW.NET replace clan servers.
• Listen servers [i.e. people's computers] will connect to each other.
• IW.NET/Steam will replace the community server admin [interface].

Modding

• Modding the game is now very much in question. fourzerotwo had no info on modding. However, it appears that there will be no mods or maps for MW2.
• Modding in SpecOps? Unknown.

Competitive Gaming

• Competitive gaming has changed forever [with respect to MW2].
• It might be possible in the future for IW engineers to load a “competitive” setting on IW.NET, but it is far from a guarantee. It might also never happen.

Why have Infinity Ward decided to do this?

Piracy is a factor. Piracy is always a factor because the higher-ups in any company (in this case Activision) are out of touch with reality. In other words, the same people that push DRM as an effect method of piracy control are the same who decided this central IW.NET system was a good idea.

A very plausible explanation lies in the fact that this theoretically forces more sales. One of the reasons CoD4 is still going strong is because of mods, custom maps, custom rules, etc. By removing all of that the game’s replayability is diminished, and it would thereby be easier to convince gamers to purchase the next game in the CoD series six months down the road.

Quite naturally, many enthusiasts are now pissed the fuck off. And this is just scraping the surface. Any forum or site that discusses MW2 is now focused solely on this issue. There’s even a petition.

Edit: It seems most of those posts on IW’s board have been deleted under the guise of “spam.” Still, people aren’t giving up. There is an “official” online petition now (it was previously a forum post that got deleted after 1500 replies) and I found this MW2 boycott Steam group.

And why wouldn’t they be pissed off? No dedicated servers? No mods? What the fuck?! If people wanted the console experience they would — get this — buy the game on a console. It appears that once again PC gamers are getting fucked, and it probably won’t end well. This comment from the Kotaku post sums it up rather nicely.

The worst part is that MW2 is sure to sell poorly on PC in light of this news, and piracy rates are sure to go through the roof. Companies will just be able to use it’s poor sales as an example of piracy, a decline in PC gaming, and whatever other bullshit excuses they use to try to force out the PC market and push the consoles even further on top.

Maybe it won’t be so bad in the end but until we know what’s going on, I implore everyone to cancel any pre-orders that you have.

It's sad that it's come to this.

I’ve attempted to cancel my pre-order from Walmart. I was unable to cancel it automatically so I had to send a message to them saying that because it was, in fact, a pre-order that I should be able to cancel it. We’ll see what happens.

Perhaps the saddest bit of all is that any boycotts and cancellations probably won’t have much of an effect. Selection bias says that there are probably far, far more people who don’t and won’t care how the multiplayer portion is handled compared to the ones who do and are currently being very vocal about these latest happenings. Statistically this could very easily turn out to be a hugely successful game regardless, and that’ll only pave the way for other developers to follow Infinity Ward’s lead in giving PC gamers the finger.