In a surprise move, Activision has removed the family sharing option on Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 for people who own the game on Steam.

Steam Family Sharing is a system set up by Valve to reasonably duplicate the old practice of friends or family members lending games to each other. The way this works is you can designate other Steam users as family, and vice versa. You can then share your games to each other, while keeping your own saves, achievements, etc.

Activision did not give out any notifications about the change, so players learned for themselves at the moment that they tried launching Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. Based on SteamDB data, the community believes Activision removed the choice to use Family Sharing on October 31, mere days after the game had launched.

The community is already complaining about this change loudly, with one redditor having this to say:

“I feel like this was done on purpose. You already put in two hours of gameplay so now you can’t get a refund. If game share was not allowed from the beginning I would have bought it on console instead and the family would have had fun.”

There are limits to the Family Sharing system, but Valve has been generous where they can. As we had reported, they have allowed you to approve 10 devices for family sharing. You can then share your library to a maximum of five other Steam accounts.

On top of these, you cannot play shared games at the same time. When given the choice, Steam will prioritize the owner of the game to the person they’re lending it to If the lender happens to be playing when the user launches the same game, Steam will notify the lender they either have to stop playing or buy the game.

And then, there is a rule that if you both own the same game but the lender doesn’t have the DLC, the lender cannot ‘borrow’ that DLC and they have to buy it separately.

Finally, region restrictions remain in place, and most importantly, there are simply some games that cannot be shared, because the developer or publisher isn’t allowing it.

We took the time to explain the Family Sharing system because it is possible that there is a vulnerability or hack that was used on the Steam version of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 that Activision had to quickly act upon. This could also explain why they did not notify their players promptly, as it could affect their investigation of such a hack, and the search for the hackers.

With all that said, PlayStation and Xbox have their own similar digital game sharing systems, and Activision have not blocked sharing for those platforms. It is certainly also likely that Activision simply want more people to buy the game on Steam. After all, they are shipping a disc out for Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 that doesn’t actually have the game in it, which you will still have to install after downloading online.

If this is a misunderstanding, we are hopeful that Infinity Ward or Activision becomes more forthcoming with explanations for these recent actions.

Source: Dexerto