A funny thing happened this week when the Call of Duty X account promoted Modern Warfare 4 using the unusually high Metacritic score averages it had earned. It shared a graphic showing an 89 on Switch 2, an 88 on PlayStation 5, and an 87 on PC as of October 26 (some of those numbers have since come down slightly). Ironically, it did not include the Metacritic average for the game on Xbox, despite Microsoft now owning the franchise. That’s because there weren’t enough reviews of the Xbox Series X/S version of the game to even get a Metacritic average.

This kicked off some discourse among game critics and Xbox console fans about why there often seem to be so many fewer reviews for games based on the Xbox version. Now, even Xbox’s own chief technology officer, Scott Van Vliet, has weighed in on the debate. “Reviewing a game on Xbox takes too many steps today,” he posted last night on X. “Press and creators should be able to redeem and play, and that’s what the team is ultimately building toward. The first updates are coming soon.”

What exactly are the “too many steps” Van Vliet is referring to? Well, normally when press and creators are approached for review codes prior to a game’s launch, they’re given the choice of which platform to select. In some cases, it’s as simple as just getting the code and going to the respective digital storefront to redeem it. But in other cases, and sometimes with Xbox specifically, there can be a more convoluted process that requires sharing an Xbox Live Device ID, waiting for the device to be “whitelisted” by the publisher, and then proceeding to get the latest build of the game downloaded.

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