- Call of Duty: World War II joined the Xbox Game Pass service on Monday, June 30.
- Players accessing the game via Game Pass were met with RCE exploits that allowed hackers to remotely take control of their PCs.
- At the time of writing, the issue is yet to be fixed or addressed by Activision.
Following Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision, Call of Duty games old and new have been drip-fed into the Xbox Game Pass service. The practice started with 2023’s Modern Warfare III, before Black Ops 6 released day and date on XGP. The latest CoD game to join the Game Pass catalogue is 2017’s World War II, but playing the game on your PC is causing some unprecedented issues.
Eager for a dose of nostalgia, thousands of players fired up the title when it joined the service on Monday. Unfortunately, their excitement quickly fizzled as reports of widespread RCE exploits began surfacing online. The acronym stands for ‘Remote Control Execution’, and hacks of this nature are generally quite rare.
Just as the name suggests, these exploits allow hackers to remotely run code on affected PCs and use the unfiltered access to steal information or execute malicious programs.
RCE exploits have plagued many games in the past, including several Call of Duty titles. And these issues appear to be running rampant in World War II. Players affected by the exploit took to Twitter to share their displeasure and implored the community to stay away from playing the game.
The hackers perpetrating the exploits have been shutting down PCs involuntarily, trolling players by typing out messages on their notepad, and in one bizarre instance, pulling up pornography on a user’s second monitor.
Needless to say, the exploits tarnish Game Pass’s image, and specifically, the release of older Call of Duty titles on the service. If left unchecked, players will actively turn away from revisiting old CoD games using the service, which could potentially halt the subscription’s growth. It’s unclear if and when these issues will be addressed by Activision, but hopefully, we’ll see a patch soon. Until then, be sure to steer clear of Call of Duty: World War II on Game Pass.
