Steam Charts: WARDOGS Climbs to #5 With 48% Gain, AION 2 Drops 21%

WARDOGS jumped 48% week-over-week to a 294,741 24-hour peak on Steam, climbing back to the top five as developer Bulkhead’s Season 2 apology and the promised midseason 0.25 fix patch kept players coming back. AION 2, by contrast, dropped 21% to a 306,966 24-hour peak after the multi-week launch run that pushed NCSOFT’s free-to-play MMORPG onto Steam’s all-time concurrent charts, according to Steam player data tracked by Pixel Herald.

The data is Steam only, sampled hourly from Steam’s official player-count API. It is not total player data across consoles.

Top 10 on Steam (Oct 12 to Oct 19, 2026)

Outside the top 10, two live-service shooters made the largest jumps. Call of Duty (the Activision hub app that covers MW4, Black Ops 7, and Warzone on Steam) peaked at 88,374, up 114% from a week-ago peak of 41,244, after Modern Warfare 4’s Campaign Early Access unlocked on October 16 (per Pixel Herald’s MW4 launch hub piece). Battlefield 6 peaked at 68,542, up 50% week-over-week, after EA’s Steam free trial extension to October 20.

WARDOGS holds the line

WARDOGS peaked at 294,741 players over the past 24 hours, up 48% from the prior week’s 199,260 high, with Bulkhead’s Season 2 apology and the September launch’s tail both still feeding the queue. The UK studio’s October 16 video and developer post saw CEO Joe Brammer say “We were wrong, we f***ed up” and outlined a hotfix for the Blue Team cash and XP bonus plus a backend fix for the Driver progression exploit (per Pixel Herald’s full WARDOGS apology piece, cross-referenced with IGN and PCGamesN). The midseason 0.25 update that adds “limited mode servers” is the bigger catalyst that’s keeping players signed in. The 336,679-player peak Pixel Herald has tracked since sampling began on October 11 is the highest we’ve seen from the game; Steam itself has not published an official all-time concurrent figure for the title.

AION 2 cools after launch

AION 2 dropped 21% from a 390,937 week-ago peak to a 306,966 24-hour peak. The fall is the natural first-month cool-down for a free-to-play MMORPG launch: NCSOFT’s PC/console return to the Aion universe landed in early October, helped by Steam’s all-time concurrent user record of 43,505,724 on October 12 (per Eurogamer, citing SteamDB), and the player base has settled into its core week-over-week pattern. NCSOFT has not announced any official concurrent-player milestone for the launch; the 391,373 peak on Pixel Herald’s tracking is the highest we’ve seen since the game’s launch window.

ARC Raiders and Bongo Cat continue to slide

Two more top-10 names fell week-over-week as live-service and rhythm-game leaders gave back post-launch gains. ARC Raiders dropped 14% to a 158,448 24-hour peak, the third straight weekly slide since Embark Studios’ extraction shooter peaked at 184,915 in early October. Bongo Cat dropped 17% to 152,534. Counter-Strike 2 dipped 4%, and Apex Legends slipped 2%.

PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS climbed 16% to a 783,765 24-hour peak, the largest top-10 move besides WARDOGS this week. KRAFTON has not posted a public patch or event tied to the spike in the past 24 hours, and no single Tier 1/2 outlet has surfaced an in-game reason. The move looks consistent with weekend play patterns for a free-to-play shooter in its eighth year on Steam. Dota 2 ticked up 3%, Rust up 1%, and FiveM up 1%.

The headline WARDOGS recovery fits a pattern visible across the past two weeks: live-service shooters that own up to launch problems tend to keep their audiences, while live-service shooters that go quiet do not. Bulkhead’s named apology and a dated midseason patch landed within a week of the missteps, which is the cadence players want. AION 2’s slide looks more like a launch-year baseline than a problem. The four-week free-to-play ramp built the queue, and the October 12 Steam concurrent record marks the realistic ceiling for a free MMORPG in 2026 unless a major content drop lands first. ARC Raiders is the third weekly slide in a row, which is the canary for an extraction shooter without a live-event cadence.

The size of the spillover from Modern Warfare 4 is the other story this week. MW4’s full launch lands October 23 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC (Steam and Battle.net), and Switch 2 (per Activision’s official launch blog), and the Steam hub has already cleared 88,000 peak concurrent players twice in the past seven days. If the full launch matches the Campaign Early Access cadence, the CoD hub will probably return to the top 10 next week’s chart.

All numbers above are Steam only and sampled hourly since October 11 by Pixel Herald; the same data powers our Player Counts page. None of the “highest tracked” figures are Steam-published all-time records. Only Valve or the publisher can confirm a true record.

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