Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Beta Peaks at 115,000 on Steam — Below Battlefield 6 and Its Own Predecessor
The first weekend of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 beta drew 115,145 concurrent players at its peak on Steam, a solid turnout that nonetheless landed behind both its direct predecessor and this year's Battlefield 6 open beta.
The peak was recorded on 21 August 2026, the opening day of the Early Access weekend, according to SteamDB data (Eurogamer). The beta ran from 11:00 AM PT on Friday, 21 August through 10:00 AM PT on Tuesday, 25 August, open to players on all platforms. Preloading began a day earlier, at 9:00 AM PT on 20 August (Call of Duty Blog).
Notably, the Modern Warfare 4 beta lives as its own separate entry on Steam — SteamDB app ID 4783780 — rather than sitting under the main Call of Duty launcher app, which has housed recent entries in the series (Eurogamer). The full game itself carries a separate Steam app ID, 4435490.
For context, these numbers tell a quieter story than some of Call of Duty's recent betas. Infinity Ward's own Modern Warfare 2 beta peaked at 168,330 concurrent Steam players in 2022 — a franchise record for the platform. The Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 beta topped out at around 100,000. So Modern Warfare 4's 115,145 sits comfortably above Black Ops 7 but well below the high-water mark set by Modern Warfare 2 (Eurogamer).
More striking is the comparison outside the franchise. The Battlefield 6 open beta peaked at 521,079 concurrent players on Steam — more than four times Modern Warfare 4's figure, and ahead of even the main Call of Duty app's numbers (Eurogamer).
The Weekend One beta gave players access to 14 weapons and allowed progression to Player Level 20, unlocking the first five Beta Rewards — cosmetic and progression items that carry over for those who purchase the full game (Call of Duty Blog). The beta was purchasable on both Battle.net and Steam, with the full game's Vault Edition carrying a release date of 23 October 2026 (SteamDB).
The Modern Warfare 4 story is set on the Korean Peninsula, where a North Korean invasion threatens to destabilise the world — a return to the grounded military conflict that defined the Modern Warfare sub-series (SteamDB).
Steam counts capture only one slice of the player base. Call of Duty's audience spans PlayStation, Xbox, and PC via Battle.net, none of which publish real-time concurrent figures the way Steam does. So while the Steam number is a useful yardstick, it is not a total headcount — and Activision has not released platform-wide figures for the beta.
What the numbers do capture is a competitive landscape. Two of gaming's biggest military shooters are arriving in the same window, and the early Steam data suggests Battlefield 6 has drawn the larger beta crowd this time around. Whether that holds through launch — Modern Warfare 4 arrives on 23 October — is a question for the sales trackers, not the beta charts.
