Modern Warfare 2 is Call of Duty’s largest Steam launch ever

Modern Warfare 2 It’s hot right now. All of this excitement extends to the PC platform, where annual Call of Duty releases tend to underperform, or in some cases not sign up at all.

Of course, that trend has changed for a while, but Modern Warfare 2 seems to be taking things to new heights on PC this year.

On Steam, Modern Warfare 2 has been and continues to be one of the platform’s top-selling games every week. It’s almost impossible to be unpopular at launch, but we now have hard numbers to prove it. The game attracted a staggering 238,522 concurrent players at its peak hours ago.

Graphs from SteamDB show that player activity climbed steadily overnight. Seeing a lot of buyers sleeping or working when the game goes live in their region, that number will likely grow later today and throughout the weekend.

This was the highest concurrent call for Call of Duty on Steam, surpassing the previous record holder Black Ops 3 with 63,681.

As of this writing, Modern Warfare 2 is the fifth most popular game on Steam. What’s more interesting is that the new concurrency spike is significantly higher than last month’s beta open to everyone (at least the last two days).

Of course, the Steam data doesn’t represent the entire population on PC, as you can still buy games on Battle.net. PC codes purchased at third-party stores are also limited to Activision Blizzard’s own platform, so probably most of them exist there.

With cross-platform play (though some people want to disable it), cross-platform play, and an optimized PC version, the return of Call of Duty is inevitable. The fact that Activision believes Modern Warfare 2 is the right game to bring Call of Duty back to Steam only makes things better.

If you’re one of the millions of people currently playing Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer, we’ve got some solid advice on the fastest ways to upgrade your weapons and the best modes to get a lot of XP.

If you’re busy with work, enjoy our campaign reviews and all of our other coverage of Modern Warfare 2 under the Games tab.