Poor Ratings Didn't Deter Gamers; CoD MW3's Crowds Strained Net Infrastructure

Source: Activision

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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, this year's installment of the best-selling FPS series, failed to live up to expectations. This, however, did not deter gamers at all.

1. As report EE, BT and Virgin Media O2, the UK's internet providers, the pre-load period and yesterday's launch of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III resulted in a record increase in the load on their net infrastructure.
2. Virgin Media O2 revealed that the load was 22% higher than during the recent return of the classic map to Fortnite.. However, it should be remembered that the latest CoD takes up a ridiculous amount of disk space, so players have to download significantly more data than in the case of Fortnite.
3. In turn EE reported that no single game in history has increased the company's network load as much as Modern Warfare 3.
4. For EE and BT, only once has there been an overall higher load on their connections. That was on February 15, this year, when a new update was released for Call of Duty: Warzone, while important soccer matches in the Champions League and the British Premier League were being played at the same time.
5. Strong interest can also be seen on Steam. Here, unfortunately, the precise determination of the results is quite difficult, because SteamDB only records client activity supporting the last few Call of Duty games. Yesterday, however, 177,000 people using this launcher were recorded, compared to 91,000 a week ago. This increase in interest is mainly due to Modern Warfare 3, especially the multiplayer and zombie modes (because early access to the campaign started on November 2).
6. However, in the case of Steam, Activision doesn't really have a reason to be very happy. Although MW3 caused an increase in activity on this service, the results achieved are far from the record from November 20, last year. Then, thanks to the release of Warzone 2.0 various games in the series was played by 491 thousand concurrent players.

Recall that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 was released on PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5.

The game's campaign receives dire reviews - average rating on OpenCritic is 55%. The game also flops for the fact that most of the multiplayer maps are revamped versions of arenas from the classic Modern Warfare 2 from 2009.

Yesterday reports emerged that the reason for such a disappointing quality of the game is that the developers had only half the normal time to develop it, which is traditionally given to teams creating new installments of the series.

1. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III on Steam
2. Call of Duty Devours Disk Space; Here's When This Became a Problem