MW4 Pushes Call of Duty Steam Hub to 108K Peak, Up 253% Week-Over-Week

The Call of Duty Steam hub hit a 108,471 peak concurrent player count over the weekend of October 17-18, 2026, the highest tracked since Pixel Herald began sampling the game’s Steam API hourly on October 11. The figure is up 253% from a week-ago peak of 30,705, according to Pixel Herald’s hourly Steam samples.

Call of Duty on Steam (appid 1938090) is Activision’s hub app that supports Modern Warfare 4, Black Ops 7, and Call of Duty: Warzone. The player spike began on Saturday, October 17, one day after the MW4 Campaign Early Access window opened on October 16, and tracks with the game’s reviews roundup landing on the same day. Per Pixel Herald’s player-counts page, the weekend peak of 108,471 players is the highest tracked.

Why the spike

The Call of Duty Steam hub tracks every PC player who launches MW4, Black Ops 7, or Warzone through Steam, since each game routes through the hub’s launcher. Three factors stacked up over the weekend:

• The MW4 Campaign Early Access window opened on October 16 for digital Standard and Vault Edition pre-orders, putting the 16-mission campaign (per Pixel Herald’s review roundup) in front of players for the first time.
• IGN’s Simon Cardy called MW4 “the best Modern Warfare since its 2019 reboot by quite some distance” in the campaign review on October 16, with 70 and 80 numeric scores appearing on Metacritic by October 17.
• October 17-18 is the natural weekend peak for any major live-service game, when working-age players have the most free time.

The full MW4 worldwide launch follows on October 23 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC (Steam and Battle.net), and Switch 2, per Activision’s October 15 launch blog. Activision has not published a public Steam concurrent-player figure for MW4 or the CoD hub at launch.

What the data shows

Other large risers over the same window: WARDOGS jumped from a week-ago peak of 139,964 to 303,352, a +117% move, after Bulkhead’s Season 2 apology on October 16 (per Pixel Herald’s WARDOGS story). PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS jumped 70% from 477,128 to 809,673. Battlefield 6 jumped 122% from 32,220 to 71,460 after the Steam free trial extension (per Pixel Herald’s Battlefield 6 story).

The CoD hub tracking at 108K players on a Sunday before the game’s full October 23 launch is the strongest pre-launch indicator Pixel Herald has captured so far. The full launch next Friday should push the figure further, especially given MW4’s cross-platform parity with PS5, Xbox, and the Switch 2 port. Activision has not announced any pre-order numbers, but a 108K Steam-only Sunday puts MW4 on track to be the franchise’s biggest PC launch since Black Ops Cold War’s 2020 debut.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report