A six-year-old shooter just out-performed the entire current Call of Duty lineup on Steam. That's not a typo.
Steam's Spring Sale slashed the price of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) by 90%, dropping it to £4.99. The impact was immediate: a 24-hour peak of 57,959 concurrent players on Steam. That's higher than the Call of Duty HQ app, which houses Black Ops 6, Black Ops 7, and the rest of the modern CoD ecosystem, managed in the same window. That app peaked at 50,325 players.
A discount that almost never happens
CoD games rarely see discounts this steep. For comparison, Black Ops 2 from 2012 is currently 67% off during the same sale, priced at £13.19. A 90% cut on a mainline Call of Duty title is practically unheard of, which makes the timing feel intentional rather than routine.
Activision officially classifies Modern Warfare (2019) as a legacy title, meaning it sits completely outside the Call of Duty HQ launcher that houses all current entries. You're buying a standalone experience with its own multiplayer, campaign, and the foundational content that eventually spawned Warzone. Separate from the live-service machine, but apparently still very much alive.
What the numbers actually say about CoD right now
The player count gap tells a story that Activision and Xbox probably don't love seeing in print. Black Ops 7 launched to mixed reception last year, and while it still ranked among 2025's top-grossing releases, the enthusiasm gap between it and older entries is hard to ignore. A discounted 2019 game pulling more concurrent Steam players than the current-gen offering is a direct signal that something in the franchise's recent direction hasn't fully landed.
Modern Warfare (2019) also overtook Battlefield 6's concurrent player count at the time of writing, though EA's shooter holds a higher 24-hour peak overall. That's a notable footnote given how much momentum Battlefield 6 carried at launch before its post-honeymoon struggles set in.
CoD HQ Steam library view
The MW4 angle worth watching
What most players miss in this story is the strategic timing. Current rumors point to Modern Warfare 4 as 2026's Call of Duty entry, developed by Infinity Ward, the same studio behind the 2019 reboot. A 90% discount right now could serve as a funnel: get new or lapsed players into the original MW continuity cheaply, build familiarity with the characters and tone, then hit them with marketing for MW4 later this year.
The 2019 game serves as the narrative starting point for this entire sub-series. Modern Warfare II (2022) and Modern Warfare III (2023) both continued that story directly, so anyone jumping in now at £4.99 is getting the prologue to whatever Infinity Ward has planned next.
Whether Activision deliberately priced it this aggressively with MW4 in mind, or whether this is just a clearance move on a title they've already written off, the player response makes the case that the franchise's goodwill still lives in that 2019 era. For the full picture on what's coming next in the series, the official Call of Duty blog remains the best place to track announcements as Infinity Ward's next project gets closer to reveal. For everything else in gaming, keep an eye on the latest gaming news as the 2026 release slate starts to take shape. Make sure to check out more:
