The Call of Duty series in particular has been a hot topic since Xbox moved to acquire Activision Blizzard, and for good reason - it's still hugely popular and would be a great get for Xbox. Well, that popularity extends as far back as the early Xbox 360 days, and funnily enough, those titles seem to have received an under-the-hood boost this week as Microsoft continues to fight the FTC over its deal.
To set the scene, most Xbox 360-era Call of Duty games are quite hard to play online these days. If you're not running into hackers or boosters, matchmaking can be extremely unreliable, even when players are online trying to match up together.
This week, Activision seems to have pushed out some sort of server-side update to multiple Call of Duty games on Xbox 360, and the update appears to have done the trick so far. Below, you can see outlet Charlie Intel informing fans of the news, whilst getting straight into online matches of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare from 2007.
Other social media posts have also hinted at titles like 2010's Call of Duty: Black Ops seeing huge improvements since this stealth patch, so if you've been eager to play some old CoD titles recently, now could be a great time to give them a whirl and see how things play out for you.
In our experience, 2009's Modern Warfare 2 has been a tricky one to play in recent times, especially via backwards compatibility where matchmaking seems even less reliable than on native Xbox 360 hardware. We can confirm that since the above post hit Twitter, we've found games almost instantly on Modern Warfare 2 - even playing on Xbox Series X.
The timing of all this is certainly curious. Even though there's been no public acknowledgement of these updates, Activision Blizzard and Microsoft are currently fighting both the US FTC and the UK CMA over the two companies' planned merger, and if they're ultimately successful there, we'd expect these older Call of Duty titles to enter the Xbox Game Pass library.
Whether the merger is the sole reason for this move or not, it'd certainly help to have the Call of Duty back catalogue ready and fully playable for a potential Game Pass drop in the coming weeks.