Users who try to launch Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II are experiencing a strange problem. When clicking on the Play button, users who try to play the game, changes to the Stop or Cancel button.
Cause of Modern Warfare 2 Not Starting or Button Greyed
Data corruption in the cache is the most prevalent known cause of this issue, leading your computer to assume that you do not own the game’s multiplayer mode incorrectly. Simply erasing the game’s cache from your hard drive should rectify the situation. The problem is likely related to a cache issue, just like what players had to go through when playing COD: Cold War.
If you happen to be one of those people, you can perhaps resolve the problem quickly by erasing the data stored in the cache of your PC game launcher. To make things easier, we’ve compiled a series of guides that will lead you through the steps of erasing the cache from your PC launcher for both:
- Steam
- Battle.net
If you’re having trouble with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, please refer to the corresponding section of this guide:
Clear Steam’s Data Cache
If you recently purchased Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II on PC and are experiencing this difficulty when attempting to launch the game using Steam, you may encounter this issue.
There are some cases where Steam won’t let you play a game you already paid for because it can’t verify that you possess it. Follow our instructions to fix this problem:
- Go to the Steam settings and then Downloads.
- Choose the Clear Download Cache options and wait for it to finish.
- The next step is to verify the integrity of the game’s files. You should see about 36 failed files were reacquired when the process ends.
To verify the integrity of game files, follow these steps:
- Launch Steam while logged into the account experiencing the problem.
- The next step is to head to the main menu and choose Library.
- In the left-hand vertical menu, find Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, then right-click on it and select Properties from the drop-down menu.
- To check the integrity of your game cache in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, go to the game’s Properties Menu and then pick Local files from the list on the left.
- To continue, select Yes when prompted and wait till the process has finished.
- Please note that it is not uncommon for some files to fail. When this happens, it’s usually because the scan found some files that shouldn’t be changed. If the problem still persists after the system has finished booting up after an integrity scan, try restarting the machine.
Clear Battle.Net’s Data Cache
It’s important to realize that a corrupted cache folder is rather prevalent among PC COD gamers who use the Battle.net launcher to launch Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. Remember that Battle.Net does not provide a software solution for properly maintaining the cache folder; you will need to perform the cleanup yourself by deleting the Blizzard Entertainment folder from ProgramData after making sure that no conflicting process is using it.
To learn how to clear the cache folder on your Battle.net launcher, please refer to the detailed method below. Please take note that the following guidelines are compatible with any recent Windows release.
- Make sure that no other Blizzard applications or Battle.net are currently active on your computer. Take note that this applies to any and all games and related applications.
- Then, launch Task Manager by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Enter. If the simplified version opened up on its own, press the More Details button.
- After you’ve launched the Task Manager’s advanced user interface, click the Processes tab.
- The next step is to examine the list of processes to see if any Battle.net agent or Battle.net Update agent processes are active. If so, right-click on them and select “End Task” from the option that appears.
- After you’ve ended all programs that could cause problems, you can launch the Run dialogue box by pressing the Windows key plus R.
- To access the cache directory, type “%ProgramData%” into the Run field and hit Enter
(ProgramData).
- After entering the hidden ProgramData folder, look for the Blizzard Entertainment and Battle.Net folders containing your cached Batte.Net data, and delete them using the right-click menu.
- After erasing the two directories, try starting Battle.net again and then launching Call of Duty: Modern Warfare again to see if it resolves the issue.
That was all for this guide on how to fix Modern Warfare II Game Won’t Start error and play button greyed out. Note that if you are facing this issue on console, you can clear the cache of tIf you want to read more guides related to COD MWII, click here. Thank you for reading this article.