Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered, the 2016 remake of Call of Duty 4, made a surprise entry into Steam's top sellers chart earlier this week. Partly because it was on sale, but the real reason was the imminent release of the H2M MOD, a massive, free fan-made project aimed at recreating the classic Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer in a new remaster. However, the project was scuttled at the last minute: one day before the mod was to be released, the developers say that Activision's lawyers came knocking.

“Today, our team members received a Cease & Desist Order on behalf of Activision Publishing in connection with the H2M-Mod project. We are immediately and permanently suspending all work in accordance with this order."

”We are also suspending all work on the H2M-Mod project.

The h2m-mod.dev website is also offline, although there has been no further communication from the makers of H2M.

Needless to say, a great many Call of Duty fans are not happy with the results. This is because there is a real desire among fans for a Modern Warfare 2 (2009) multiplayer: as staff writer and Modern Warguy Morgan Park said earlier this week when writing about the H2M mod, “Modern Warfare 2 is still considered the peak of CoD for many in their late teens”. Despite this, the officially remastered version of Modern Warfare 2, to be released by Activision in 2020, will not include multiplayer: only a campaign attempt.

And not only does “H2M” include remastered versions of all of the “Modern Warfare 2” multiplayer maps, it also includes a campaign level reworked for multiplayer combat and all of the “Call of Duty 4” maps, 54 maps in total. This is a major event and a major loss for C&D.

But the fact that Activision waited until the last possible moment to drop the C&D on this project and, more importantly, until the end of the Steam sale, also bothers many. As we noted, so many people rushed to buy Modern Warfare Remastered at half price just to play the H2M mod that some fans believe that Activision intentionally left things to chance in order to take advantage of the huge sales increase . As a result, many H2M followers on Twitter (some of whom have many followers themselves) have called for a refund, making sure to do so now.

“Much of the original Infinity Ward team was made up of developers who were once modders,” former Call of Duty creative strategist Robert Bowling said on Twitter following the mod closure.

“The original Call of Duty PC game released mod tools and server files to help create a community to extend the original vision, let's build a system that supports the UGC community instead of strangling it.”

Others had a more succinct take on the whole matter.

While sad, the outcome is not entirely surprising. This is not the first time Activision has ordered a cease and desist order on a “Call of Duty” mod project: in just one week in 2023, they shut down the SM² Call of Duty client mod project, which they had been working on for two years, and the old IW4X mod made by X Labs.