Modern Warfare 2: How to disable crossplay in Xbox?

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer is finally here with many new quality-of-life features released along with a massive serving of gameplay content.

One of these features is the crossplay between several platforms. It is a well-received feature that allows players to play with friends and players across various platforms, removing the need to own specific versions of the game, console, or PC. It is a staple feature of this current generation of consoles and will be one going forward.

As nice as it is, it might still not be kinder to players who want to play with or against people on specific platforms, since players and gameplay might differ when competing on PC and console. Hacks, DDoS attacks, and other malicious activities often take place in multiplayer PC titles, which due to crossplay, often have a chance to leak over to servers with console players.

Console players enjoy the luxury of not having to deal with hackers, but this might be ruined by crossplay allowing PC hackers to ruin matches for console players in Modern Warfare 2.

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Disabling crossplay on Xbox for Modern Warfare 2

There is no way to disable crossplay in Modern Warfare 2 through the in-game settings at the moment for Xbox users. However, you can turn it off within the console settings itself. If you are an Xbox user who wants to disable crossplay, you can do so by following these steps:

1. First, go to the dashboard and press the Xbox button. Now you can select 'Settings.
2. Under the Account section, select the "Privacy and online safety" option.
3. Then, hit the Xbox Privacy option and choose the “View details and customize” option.
4. As you head over to this section, select the "Communication & multiplayer" option.
5. You need to toggle and block the “You can join Cross-Network play” option.

Once you start a multiplayer game on Modern Warfare 2 after going through all the steps, you might have to provide authorisation. No worries, this is just a prompt asking for your profile's PIN or authorisation via your Microsoft account. It is recommended to restart the console once in order for the settings to take place.

Upon clearing all these steps, you will only be able to play with other Xbox users. This will also disable the crossplay feature for other games too, so be careful and revert back to the settings if you need to play Modern Warfare 2 or any other title featuring crossplay. You can do so by following the same steps, but with the fifth step, toggle it back to 'active'.

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Previously, there were options in the game to disable the crossplay feature across platforms. But for some reason, those have now been removed by the devs. The only platform still retaining the in-game option is the PlayStation.

The crossplay disable option is expected to return to all platforms as it seems like a necessary quality-of-life feature to have. Until then, this fix works just fine for all Xbox users playing Modern Warfare 2.