Xbox promises to fix review codes after Modern Warfare 4 misses an Xbox score

[PaleSentinel]

Call of Duty on Xbox has an awkward problem: almost nobody reviewed it there. Kotaku reports that Modern Warfare 4 has so few critic reviews on Xbox Series X and S that it has no Xbox Metacritic average at all

The Call of Duty account promoted scores of 89 on Switch 2, 88 on PS5 and 87 on PC, although some have dipped slightly since. Xbox, which owns Call of Duty, was missing from the list

Xbox chief technology officer Scott Van Vliet responded on X, saying reviewing a game on Xbox takes too many steps today. He said press and creators should be able to redeem a code and play, and that the first updates are coming soon

At the moment, Xbox review codes can require sending an Xbox Live device ID and waiting for the publisher to approve the console, as happened with 007 First Light. PC codes often arrive earlier, and Steam's beta branches make pre-release patches easier to distribute. Kotaku's writer thinks friction is not the whole story, because many critics choose PS5 for performance anyway

It is a strange situation for the company that owns Call of Duty, and an embarrassing one. Simplifying review codes is an easy win that should help every game on the platform. Whether it changes where critics choose to play is another question

Which platform do you usually read reviews for? And should Xbox worry that critics prefer other consoles?

Modern Warfare 4's Missing Xbox Metacritic Score Sparks Changekotaku.com