Last week, our Twitter feeds were flooded with images and clips from Call of Duty 'H2M'; a planned mod that fully remastered the original Modern Warfare 2's multiplayer suite. Some huge YouTubers were getting behind the mod as its dev team began to let people test it prior to launch, but right on the eve of its release, Activision has shut down the mod with immediate effect.
Taking to social media just hours before launch, the H2M team said that it had "received a Cease & Desist order on behalf of Activision Publishing" that forced them to shut down the mod before it became available to the public.
They also quickly followed up by saying that anyone pretending to be them, or imitating the mod in any way, had nothing to do with the H2M team. An emphatic "we're done" follow-up message underlines how serious the shutdown order was from the Call of Duty owner.
We can certainly understand the reason behind wanting to shut this down from an ActiBlizz perspective - the mod team was getting so much hype behind a free download that could have impacted sales of current and future COD releases. However, the modders did make it a requirement to own a proper copy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered (the game it was built from) to play H2M; which in turn made the 2017 remaster shoot up the Steam charts last week.
Alas, H2M isn't to be, and clearly, some fans are maybe not quite as understanding about the whole shutdown here - which is fair enough. MW Remastered is being review-bombed on Steam as a result of this Cease & Desist order, and we've had no official comment from Activision since it sent out said order to the H2M team.