My hopes of playing COD: Warzone on a Chromebook are shattered

Today’s been a big day and I’ve known it would be for weeks. The NCAA Tournament – A.K.A. March Madness – has begun, the Logitech Casa Pop-Up Desk is up for order at Best Buy (and our review unit arrived today), a new show I’ve been interested in watching is available today (Netflix’s 3-Body Problem), and most importantly of all, Call of Duty: Warzone launched today.

Full disclosure, I actually checked at 11pm EDT last night to see if it was available yet and it was. And I played for way too long! It’s a fantastic game that captures the spirit and feel of its desktop/console counterpart in a way I’ve not seen for a mobile shooter. While the graphics aren’t exactly what you get on GeForce NOW, they look great and most importantly, the feel of the game is retained with all its tension and speed. I’m really enjoying it so far.

Even better, because it’s such a big title, there are plenty of real people already in there playing. I’ve yet to encounter a single enemy that even feels remotely like a bot, and though that’s meant a fair bit of tough love for my first handful of rounds, I’d rather get my butt kicked as I learn than win matches against lame bots.

Some hope for Chromebooks

In the weeks leading up to today, I pre-registered for this new game and noticed that I was able to see it and select the option to auto-install it on nearly every Chromebook I tried. That gave me plenty of hope that I’d be able to test this fresh, new Call of Duty on a Chromebook today, and as far as being able to download and install the game on a variety of devices, I wasn’t let down.

The only Chromebook I tried that wouldn’t even find the game in the Play Store was the Lenovo Flex 3i and my guess is the small-core 12th gen chips simply aren’t on the approved list for Activision’s latest COD game. It was a bummer at first, but after trying out the freshly-installed Warzone on Chromebooks with 12/13th-gen Intel, AMD Ryzen, MediaTek Kompanio and Snapdragon internals, I’m sad to report that I had precisely 0% success rate in actually playing COD: Warzone on any of them.

Once again, Chromebooks are forgotten

For all the MediaTek devices I tried (Kompanio 1380, 1200, and 520), I got a message right at launch that the GPU was not supported. With the 12th and 13th-gen Intel devices, the game installed, set up, and ran up until I needed to log in. At that point, everything came to a halt. The AMD Ryzen 2 7320C devices were the same story, and though the Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 actually loaded up and let me sign in, the gameplay was running at about 1 frame per second and was completely unusable. Total and utter failure.

And just like that, my hopefulness went down the drain as I realized that it’s the same crap, just a different day. Like we’ve seen so many times in the past, it’s quite clear that the mistake Activision made wasn’t in their failure to make sure things worked on Chromebooks; it was in the decision to not remove this game from availability in the Play Store for Chromebooks.

There’s no way they even thought about the Chromebook component on this one, or else they would have quickly marked this as incompatible with ChromeOS for the time being. Had they considered Chromebooks at all and tested things, they would have come to the same realization I did today: this game won’t play on ChromeOS. And if they had taken the time to at least test this out, they could have flipped the switch to hide the game from Chromebook users in the Play Store.

Instead, I and many other had our hopes up that COD: Warzone might actually be playable on a Chromebook and were left with nothing but disappointment after trying. I understand the underpowered devices not getting in on the action, but I don’t have any clue why at least Chromebook Plus devices aren’t targeted and supported. There’s plenty of processing power for this game in an Intel-based Chromebook, so there’s no real reason for it not to work.

Maybe it will change in the coming weeks and maybe – just maybe – we’ll be able to play this incredibly fun, well-made game on competent Chromebooks before too long. I know ChromeOS isn’t the target audience for big releases like COD: Warzone, but just once I’d love to see a game like this launch with Chromebooks in mind, too. Just once.