Windows Central is reporting on news that seems potentially troubling, especially in regard to PC gaming going forward. If you've purchased Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare through the Windows 10 store you will not be able to play against anyone who purchased their copy through Steam.

The incentives to go through the Windows 10 store seemed to fall on the fact that there was a pretty decent price for all available versions of the game. At first people speculated that the Windows Store versions would be crossplay compatible with XBone but that is not the case.

Microsoft seems to be laying the blame on Activision and Infinity Ward by stating, "We support cross-play between devices and platforms for partners who want to enable it." As the article states, Gwent is sold separately on Steam and the Windows store but it allows "cross play" between Steam and Windows Store users. COD:IW is also not a "Play Anywhere" title for Microsoft.

COD:IW was already under heat from the "community" following its launch trailer and criticisms of them taking the franchise into full blown sci-fi, space combat but now this happens and many longtime COD professional players and streamers are criticizing its multiplayer. I can only expect that by the end of the year we see some course correction from Activision with this issue and also allowing the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare remaster to be sold separately. The franchise is already considered to be in decline so it will be interesting to watch and see how Activision and the community responds.

That's crazy! Hopefully you would be able to get a refund? I don't know the Windows Store policy. I couldn't care less about Infinite Warfare's multiplayer, but I have heard that the campaign in the standout this time around and I'm pretty excited to try it.

I can understand them not wanting to do the work to bridge together users across those two different ecosystems, but that being the case, they should've just not done the Windows Store release.

@chaser324: I could have understood the move if Windows Store users could play with/against Xbox One users, but that's not the case. I don't expect Activision to respond to the criticism directly as their online FAQ confirms the segregation.

@pompouspizza: Windows Store is like most of the MS stuff and so you jump into a virtual chat thing and give it about 15 minutes to explain you want a refund and it should be pretty painless when you make it clear the product isn't working for you (ye, so "there are no players because this doesn't work with the actual PC audience" meets my definition of not working). They have a list of faults they're going to match you up against to authorise the refund.

Oh, and in the Store fine print it says no refunds so technically MS could stop doing this tomorrow without breaking too many laws (ok, it breaks a lot of laws all over the globe about consumer protections but online stores seem mighty unconcerned about legality for the most part). But in practice then it seems to work ok (had to get a refund for Horizon 3 because that game was broken on PC and then the first patch made it worse on my system and a weekend offline informed me that game has an online-only requirement not advertised on the store page in any way).

Moral of the story, do not buy anything from the windows store. That's just silly, there will be like 100 people playing on windows store smh.

@shivoa: In my experience on the Xbox at least, Microsofts customer service has always been top notch so hopefully they don't fuck people over who bought this thing and didn't realise that you can't play with steam users.

The more puzzling thing for me is why Infinite Warfare requires 95 gb of space to install? What is up with games these days? Gears 4 was about 80 gb and thats pretty big - game does look really spectacular though. Now I don't know, maybe Infinite Warfare is similarly amazing in terms of graphics but these game installs are seriously bloating up over the past year or so. I remember Doom being quite large and it seems like the sky is the limit. Thankfully I have no data caps (yet) so it's just a matter of more time needed to get the game but sheesh. A year or two ago most games seemed like they were in the 15 gb range.

As for the cross-play I don't know why anyone would think there would be crossplay between Windows Store and Steam. As shitty as it might be, it was pretty obvious that Steam would not want to associate itself with the Windows platform in the slightest and Gabe has been very vocal and public about his disdain for Windows. It seems as surprising as buying the PS4 version and realizing that you can't play with XB1 players.

@humanity: Ok, something I really don't get:

The game is 93GB installed on the Windows Store specs. It's 70GB on the Steam specs page. What?

Oh, and talk about large filesizes, if you get the complete package with the remaster of MW the WinStore page says 149GB. I used to own SSDs smaller than that!

As to why things grow rapidly: textures. They grow at the square of the edge size increase. 1GB of 256x256 textures is, when you make the next step up, 4GB of 512x512 textures. So when you step it up a notch, it gets much bigger very quickly. Now we've got GPUs with 4-8GB of VRAM as standard and even consoles with 8GB of unified memory then devs are pushing the higher res where possible. Oh, and some jokers *cought*TitanFall1*cough* are dumping uncompressed audio files in because they've got 50GB on the optical drive to fill on console so don't bother to compress it.

I liked the era where AAA games on Steam made their maximum resolution textures into a free DLC pack so you could grab the standard game and download maybe 20GB to play it. Got a high-end card with lots of VRAM and want the most detail when you're up close and looking at a wall? Add the option 30GB additional DLC for it.

@shivoa: at least this motivates me to finish up Gears 4 as I quite literally need to uninstall Gears if I want to install Infinite Warfare - I still have an older, smaller SSD. I really need to finally buy another one now that they have relatively gone down in price.

@humanity: Right now I'm waiting on local stock/pricing on those new Samsung 960 M.2 stick SSDs. Grab a PCI-Express adaptor for a few pennies and plug in some of the fastest storage the world has ever seen for not a terrible price (EVO being more affordable than the Pro). Take the step way beyond the limits of S-ATA III and into SSDs that are pushing at the beginning of the limits of PCI-E 4x slots.

Just seen that Samsung are throwing in free copies of Watch_Dogs 2 on PC for 500GB+ drives in a Black Friday/Christmas offer, but I'm not sure if that offer is going to also include non-US sales (I'm tempted to pick that game up near release, that's a very good freebie).

@shivoa: that is indeed a pretty good freebie. I'm not sure but I might have gotten Watch Dogs 1 through a similar promotion

SSD's really aren't that expensive anymore, at least not if you watch for deals. Back in march I got a 1Tb Samsung drive for $240 through Newegg. I can't remember the name of the series besides something Evo, but I remember it was the top-rated everywhere even.

That is pretty dumb.

@shivoa: is it confirmed to actually install at that size? I assumed that was counting all the planned DLC which includes maps AND Zombies (crap). Still shouldn't account for the huge difference in size though...

Update #1: A source familiar to the matter recently informed us that the decision to segregate Windows 10 Store and Win32 PC platform players is entirely on Activision. There is nothing about the UWP toolset that prevents cross-play functionality, as seen with CD Projekt RED's upcoming GWENT card game.

Yikes if true. Why would Activision actively make the decision to split the base?

Is the Windows 10 Store version one of those UWP apps? If so, was anyone really going to buy it anyway after what's happened with previous games?

First going after Twitch and now Steam? Good luck with that, Microsoft.

Cross-play with the Xbox population seems like the only thing that could save it.

@joe_mccallister: I think CoD uses the Steam matchmaking and anti-cheat stuff on PC, so a non-Steam would not be able to use that I guess.

@gundogan: That would make a lot of sense - it's just a weird choice if Activision decided "we can't make it work" and didn't divulge any of this to consumers pre-launch. So now not only do you have to worry about buying the same platform, but you've got to make sure the dev/publisher were able to get parity across different stores on the same platform. Sweet lord this might get ugly.

@dharmabum: that site referenced in the first post put up some updates that said MS supports cross-platform and that the design choice was made by Activision not MS. Still weird, and a total gaffe if that's the case. Hopefully a patch can fix something like that but I wouldn't want to be the one tasked with coding it.

They sold Games for Windows Live games on there no problem, and Uplay games, i don't think Valve cares. and Microsoft as stated in the OP supports cross-play. There was no reason for people to assume that it wouldn't be cross-play, it looks like its just a poor decision on Activisions part. As much as Gabe may hate Microsoft, i think Steam being more open and the money they earn would be his higher interest.

@joe_mccallister: Not sure what Activision's motivation is either. Rocket League is the only third party example I can think of that supports cross-network play with Xbox and Steam. Gears 4 is also going to try out social cross-play weekends in PvP but that's first party of course.

@humanity: I just recently added another 500GB SSD to my system purely for games. It felt a little crazy, but I think it's worth it. My 250GB Windows drive is too small for more than a few games (especially games that will only grow in size with future DLC), and my old 1TB HDD is loud and the load times are crap from that thing once you've experienced SSD load times. Whenever my next build is, I'm just gonna go all the way with a 1TB+ SSD boot drive.

@lego_my_eggo: you'd think so and yet..

@humanity: Im just saying all signs point to this being an Activision/Infinity Ward decision, not a policy or technical limitation of Steam, the Windows Store, or Gabe hating something.

I don't understand Activision's motivation here. Why are they doing this, and what's their gain from doing this?

And this doubly sucks because the game (including the Deluxe Edition) seems to be 20% off on the Windows 10 Store.

@lego_my_eggo: Do we know that?

We know Steam don't have a limitation on selling products which integrate other store APIs into them. There is a rule that you need to also offer DLC in the Steam store (so EA can't sell The Sims on Steam without also selling Sims DLC on the store, but there are no rules about not allowing that Sims game to also include Origin and offer DLC on the Origin store - it's not a requirement for exclusivity for Steam for that DLC; you don't need to build a pure-Steam version just for the Steam store). So you could sell a CoD game on Steam with UWP/WinStore/GfWL3.0 hooks in it as long as you didn't force players to go to the WinStore to buy the DLC (you could offer the DLC on both stores).

But this is a game using the Steam API for enabling matchmaking/multiplayer. Do we know that the Windows Store allows products on it which integrate a competing platform (using the Steam API means the CoD install would require the installation of Steam to enable it) and offer DLC from those stores?

I don't think we do yet. Even the 3rd party stuff I've seen on the store is isolated to only refer to WinStore for DLC. So Rise of the Tomb Raider on Steam uses the Steam API (leaderboard, achievements, DLC, cloud saves) but that's not the version on the Windows Store because possibly MS would not allow it.

Gwent (presumably) uses the GOG back-end (which was built to cross platforms for devs who want that) and so MS clearly don't ban using any 3rd party API on the Windows Store but I'm not sure if Gwent installs the GOG Galaxy client. I don't think the Ubisoft mobile ports on the WinStore install uPlay. Maybe building the CoD version for the WinStore did require removing the Steam matchmaking so it was going to be a lot of extra work to build a bridge between them (if MS doesn't allow Steam API titles on their store) that Activision didn't want to do (even if technically possible).

@lego_my_eggo: Oh it's certainly not a technical limitation I agree. I just think, and maybe this is just me, but if I were to buy a game in a particular eco-system I would expect the multiplayer portion of that game to exist in that ecosystem. Even though other games have shared these pools of players in the past, my initial assumption would always be "this is an Origin game so I'll matchmake with Origin players / This is a Steam game so I'll matchmake with Steam players.." etc. I can completely see how others might have thought otherwise if they had past experiences where this was not the case.

If this kind of disparity continues with the windows store games then it simply isnt worthwhile to buy any multiplayer based games from there. Unless you want to play those specific multiplayer games with a playerbase which in most cases is probably pretty small in size.

I am just wondering how much this is Activisions fault and how much this is microsofts doing as this just feels kinda like they still want to compete with steam as a gaming platform. On the other hand i dont think they allow the pc users to play with the xbox one users either. So this isnt just a case of not being able to play the game with the steam users.

MS allows anyone to play between PC users and Xbox One users, but it's up to the developers to implement it (Rocket League and Gwent as well as their first party games comes to mind).

Also, MS has no reason to restrict anyone to play between Windows Store and Steam games, since such a stupid restriction would make people not buy any games on the Windows Store.

@humanity: Them 4k textures don't fuck around.