Modern Warfare 4 has already sold 100K+ copies on Steam

A lot is riding on this year’s Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 4. Last year’s entry was – there’s only one word for it – a disaster by CoD standards. Now, the new Xbox regime is fully focused on margins and ROI and wants CoD to come back guns blazing.

Since last year, new Call of Duty games are now off Game Pass day and date, the new one is launching on Switch 2 (the first time in 13 years!), and this year is a good comp in that Modern Warfare 4 isn’t in direct competition with Battlefield 6 and the surprise-ish hit Arc Raiders.

Non-coincidentally, Activision has also just dropped two iconic Black Ops ports on PlayStation to remind everyone how much they loved old CoD, and to great effect.

The signals are positive so far when we look at Steam. Modern Warfare 4 – which comes out on October 23, has already shifted 105K copies on Steam for $5.9M in revenue, as per our estimates.

Our wishlist estimates have Modern Warfare 4 at just 61K Steam wishlists. But the Steam page has been live for wishlisting and pre-purchase since the 28 May reveal. AAA wishliters practically never buy at launch, instead bookmarking to wait for a discount. Anyone eager has pre-ordered, so – simply put – wishlist count doesn’t matter a whole lot here.

That said, China is the biggest wishlist country for MW4 on Steam (about a fifth of the 61K). Steam is where Chinese players buy their AAA and AA games. Xbox hasn’t exactly been shy about its plans to conquer the East as well.

Before he became Xbox’s Chief Strategy Officer, Mathew Ball’s yearly reports – which handily aggregate a bunch of data and insights from financials and third-party data providers – often emphasised China as a growth vector for the industry.

And Xbox boss Asha Sharma said it herself in a recent memo to staff: “We will build long-term plans for our biggest franchises across film, television, consumer products, sponsorship, live experiences, and form new partnerships globally, including China”

The looming shadow, of course, is GTA 6 (out weeks after MW4). Our overlap shows that of everyone who’s played Call of Duty on Steam this month, about 6% have also played GTA 5 (10% on the consoles). GTA 6 is certainly going to steal some attention from CoD this November (and December, and January, and whenever the online launches...)

But still, the numbers and sentiment around MW4 are looking decent so far – or at least an improvement on last year. The imminent beta will likely boost those numbers, if it sticks the landing. We’ll get to that in a bit, but first let’s have a gander at how Xbox is looking to increase margins for CoD – beyond removing it from the Game Pass premium-sales-cannibalisation machine.

In an official Call of Duty blog post, ironically subtitled with the game’s slogan of “Warfare Without Limits,” Xbox reveals there are – in fact – what seem to be limits. To play MW4’s campaign a week early, players have to digitally pre-order the Standard Digital or Vault edition. Multiplayer and everything else unlock on the October 23 launch, though.

This is a bit of behavioural nudging that’s actually a targeted strike on secondary-market cannibalisation. And it’s something CoD has done in the past even before Xbox acquired Activision.

There’s a little but real share of players who buy

If the campaign is as good as I’m hearing, FOMO will push a lot of players to pull the trigger (pun not intended, promise!) onto the version they can’t trade in. It’s a similar squeeze Sony is bear-hugging with the move away from discs in 2028, but more precise and less direct.

It’s not just campaign stuff, though. Physical MW4 players also forgo other digital pre-order bonuses (online cosmetics, operator packs, and stuff). They’re really going in hard on the FOMO stuff, too:

• There’s a uniquely numbered cosmetic that is artificially scarce for the first 100K players who unlock it.

• A 10% “loyalty discount” on the Vault edition that’s exclusive to returning players who buy digitally (it’s not available if you upgrade later and pushes the faithful to the priciest edition at the earliest moment.

• A deployment bonus for the DMZ open-world extraction shooter mode that could be classed as pay-to-win – and might be a slippery slope.

At the end of the day, the message for fans is buy the digital expensive edition, and buy it now! It’s all part of the increase-ARPU-from-superfans push we’re continuing to see across the industry, as margins become evermore important in a mature market that’s no longer growing.

Those who pre-order Modern Warfare 4 digitally also get earlier access to the beta (they can access on August 21, a week before everybody else. The beta will have core 6v6 multiplayer, a single-player mission (not usual for a beta), and a whole bunch of other stuff you can see below:

As is usual (and smart), beta rewards will carry into the full game for retention and to avoid an annoying first-time use experience in the main game.

Of course, fellow Xbox first-party title Gears of War E-Day also had a beta recently, and it led to E-Day briefly hopping over Modern Warfare 4 in terms of copies sold. That suggests big things from the CoD beta – especially if it sticky grenades the landing (okay, that pun was intentional, obviously…)

For the past couple of months, Modern Warfare 4 and E-Day have been shifting pre-order copies sold on Steam, and MW4 was comfortably leading for a while, until E-Day had its first beta, which ran between August 6 and 10 exclusively for those who pre-ordered (on Steam, anyway – we covered that beta for Xbox here).

As you can see above, the effect the beta had on Steam copies sold was quick:

• Before and during the beta, E-Day sold over 12K copies a day (versus MW4’s steadier 1.5K-ish)

• E-Day then overtook MW4 on August 7 it overtook Modern Warfare 4 outright for about eight days.

• But E-Day’s sales halted as soon as the beta ended, at just 2.3K more copies sold across the following week – even though there was an open beta last weekend (that beta attracted another 400K players on Xbox by the way, bringing the total across the betas to 1.6M)

The takeaway here, I reckon, is that the E-Day beta was a sugar rush for those probably already wanting to buy it eventually. It just pulled those purchase forward. And the momentum ended as soon as the pre-order-only beta did.

Meanwhile Modern Warfare 4 quickened its steady climb, thanks to a first-look trailer on 14 August (revealing that campaign mission in the beta) as well as increasing hype for its preorder-only beta.

MW4 retook the lead on 16 August and detonated, adding 6K+ copies in one day on 17 August. Now that MW4’s marketing cycle is kicking off in earnest, its sales across platforms will only continue to grow.

MW4’s early beta for digital pre-orders will no doubt drive sales on Steam. Hit subscribe below to see the impact, as well as some beta stats across console, next week.

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