It turns out Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare Windows Store players are swimming in a smaller pond than they realised.
Call of Duty games have very short, very formulaic campaigns. They’re usually about six hours of corridors, funnels and pinch points, punctuated by explosions, high production value cutscenes with digitised celebrity actors, and very little interactivity other than shooting people in the face. Oh, and a couple of extra hours of zombies mode. That’s normally ace.
Usually, then, players get their money’s worth via the game’s extremely popular multiplayer, which is why it’s so surprising that Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare Windows Store purchasers can’t actually play online multiplayer with their Steam counterparts.
Yes, that’s right – we’re not talking about the age old divisions between PlayStation and Xbox players, or PC and console – these are two different subsets of PC gamers who literally can’t see, interact, or play with one another, just because of how they bought the game. The bizarre revelation was revealed by Activision themselves in an answer to a F.A.Q. over on their support site:
Can I play Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered for Windows 10 on Windows Store with my friends that are playing on another PC platform?
No, you can only play these titles with other users of Windows 10 on Windows Store.
So if you were thinking of making a Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare Windows Store purchase, you might want to reconsider. While we don’t have stats on the Windows Store like we do from Steam’s database, it’s fair to assume that – given Steam is the biggest PC platform by some distance – there are less Infinite Warfare Windows Store owners, and therefore less people to play against.
At the time of writing, there’s about 14,000 owners and 2,500 concurrent players on Steam, according to SteamDB. Those numbers – even on the more popular platform – aren’t exactly enormous, so if you’re playing Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare via a Windows Store purchase, expect to run into the same players, over and over again.