Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 Beta Draws Over 115,000 Peak Steam Players as Infinity Ward Rewrites the Gunplay
The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 beta peaked at 115,145 concurrent players on Steam during its first weekend, and the second weekend came close without breaking that record — reaching a little over 113,000 on Friday, 28 August 2026. Those numbers, tracked by SteamDB and reported by Eurogamer, cover only the PC version on Steam. Player counts on PlayStation 5, Xbox, and Switch 2 are not publicly visible, so the full beta audience across all platforms remains unknown. Eurogamer
The beta ran across two weekends in August 2026. Weekend One required a pre-order; Weekend Two, running from 28 August to 1 September, was open to everyone for free on all platforms — including the Switch 2, marking the first time a Call of Duty beta was accessible on Nintendo's current console. Call of Duty
Weekend Two also broadened the content on offer. Players got a sampler of Warzone's next Resurgence map — the free-to-play battle royale's faster, respawn-enabled mode — set on a new location called Zodiac. Two Ground War maps, which feature large-scale battles with dozens of players per side, were added alongside every map and mode from the first weekend. Call of Duty
Between weekends, developer Infinity Ward shipped a substantial patch that touched nearly every core system. Every weapon had its damage reduced, a direct response to player complaints from Weekend One that the time to kill — how quickly a shooter drops an opponent — was too fast. Slides were nerfed: shorter distance, lower speed, and a longer delay before a player could jump out of a slide.
Tactical Sprint, an accelerated run that had been on by default, was removed as a standard ability and tied instead to a perk called Blood Rush. Spawns were reworked to place players at more predictable positions near map edges rather than at random points. Killstreaks — bonus abilities earned by stringing together kills without dying — now require one additional kill across the board, making them harder to trigger. Eurogamer
For context, the previous Modern Warfare — 2022's Modern Warfare II — saw its beta peak at nearly 170,000 concurrent Steam players, per Eurogamer's reporting at the time. More recently, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 was reported to have underperformed on Steam during its launch weekend in November 2025. Eurogamer Eurogamer
For fans, the beta's Steam numbers suggest a healthy level of interest heading into launch, even if they trail the Modern Warfare II beta's 2022 high. The bigger story may be the patch itself: Infinity Ward used the gap between weekends to act on player feedback at a scale that reshaped movement, gunplay, and rewards in one pass. Whether those changes stick into the full release — and how the Switch 2 audience, invisible to public trackers, shapes the game's overall footprint — will become clearer when Modern Warfare 4 launches.
