Microsoft played a pivotal role in reviving older Call of Duty titles

The Microsoft acquisition of Call of Duty publishers, Activision-Blizzard, is on the horizon after a judge in California denied FTC's request for a preliminary injunction to stop the merger from going through. Since then, Microsoft has been preparing for its $68.7 billion purchase by putting all Call of Duty games on the Xbox Store for sale and reviving older titles.

Recently, various old-generation CoD games' servers for the Xbox 360 were fixed, resulting in a wave of players rushing in to play the 10+ year-old titles. However, the same games on other platforms, such as PC and PlayStation 3, did not see the same surge.

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How did older Call of Duty titles see a massive surge in players?

A tweet by ModernWarzone (Image via Twitter)

The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is the only barrier stopping Microsoft from completing the merger with Activision-Blizzard. The tech giant has paused its deal as it plans to negotiate with the CMA to complete the transaction with all countries in the agreement.

However, Microsoft presumes that the deal will go through nonetheless, and has been preparing for it in various ways. Recently, all Call of Duty games on the Xbox Store have been put on a discount of up to 70%, including the latest titles. The CoD sale concludes at the end of this month.

The sale has also helped in boosting the number of players on the older titles. Furthermore, Microsoft has played a hand in fixing the servers of older Call of Duty titles, which has allowed players to get back into the games without the risk of running into cheaters. The same games are also backward compatible on the Xbox One and Series X/S consoles.

A tweet by CODMW2Informer (Image via Twitter)

This has resulted in a huge wave of players getting back on games such as Black Ops 1, Black Ops 2, Modern Warfare, Modern Warfare 2, and World at War. Some games have seen more than 100,000 concurrent players, although it is difficult to verify the legitimacy of the displayed numbers.

This maneuver brings many players back to their consoles as Microsoft makes a move to own all CoD titles in the near future. Activision never attempted to fix the older servers as it did not want to pull away players from the latest titles, which is the company's biggest source of income.