Modern Warfare 4 Is Already a Steam Top 10 Seller, and the Beta Hasn't Even Started

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 does not launch until October 23, but people are already paying for it. At the time of writing, Infinity Ward's next Call of Duty is sitting at #9 on Steam's worldwide revenue chart, ahead of dozens of games you can actually play today. The more interesting part is what happens next. The first major public test begins on August 21, and Activision is putting far more than normal multiplayer into it. After watching the early gameplay and comparing impressions from people who have already played it, I think Modern Warfare 4 looks better than Call of Duty has any right to look this predictable. That is both a compliment and a warning.

Call of Duty being a top seller is not news by itself. This series could probably put Captain Price on a toaster and move a respectable number of units. What caught my attention is the timing. Modern Warfare 4 is currently #9 on SteamDB's live global ranking by revenue even though the beta has not started and the finished game is still more than two months away. It currently sits among free-to-play giants, new releases and heavily discounted games, while the $69.99 preorder is competing without the benefit of player reviews or a launch-day population spike.

The weekly chart gives some perspective. Modern Warfare 4 ranked #27 for the August 11 to August 18 period, but its position on the live chart has since moved considerably higher as attention shifts toward the August beta. That does not tell us exactly how many copies Activision has sold because Steam's rankings are based on revenue and Valve does not publish preorder units here. It does tell us that a significant amount of money is already moving through the game.

I think the reason is fairly simple: Infinity Ward is giving people something tangible much earlier than usual. The Modern Warfare 4 beta starts August 21 for preorder customers, only two days from now, and this time Activision is testing campaign, multiplayer and eventually Warzone rather than treating the beta as a weekend of Team Deathmatch with a few unlocks attached.

That is a much better way to sell a $70 game.

This might be the first Call of Duty beta I would play for the campaign first

Modern Warfare 4's Entrenched mission will be playable during the beta.

The biggest surprise is Entrenched, a complete campaign mission included in the beta. PC Gamer notes that this is a first for Call of Duty. Instead of asking players to take Infinity Ward's cinematic trailers at face value, Activision is letting them sample part of the single-player campaign months before release. The mission takes place during the fictional North Korean invasion at the center of Modern Warfare 4's story and follows South Korean troops during a large ground offensive.

I like this decision much more than another preorder skin.

Call of Duty campaigns are easy to advertise. Put soldiers in helicopters, blow up a building, play dramatic music, let Price say something vaguely threatening, cut to black. The harder question is whether the mission is actually enjoyable once you have been holding the controller for twenty minutes.

Entrenched should give us an answer.

The campaign moves between the Korean front and a separate story involving Captain Price. Image: Activision / Infinity Ward

Infinity Ward's full campaign is built around two connected perspectives. Private Park is a young South Korean soldier thrown into an invasion, while Captain Price is operating outside the system on a personal mission that eventually collides with the wider conflict. The campaign is expected to move beyond Korea into New York, Paris, Mumbai and other locations as the war expands.

There is something appealing about beginning with a soldier who is not already the most famous man in the Call of Duty universe. Price is great, but the rebooted Modern Warfare games have spent a lot of time treating their established operators like superheroes. Park gives Infinity Ward an opportunity to make the beginning of the war feel dangerous again.

The first reaction from players to the beta campaign reveal has been surprisingly straightforward. One person in the Modern Warfare 4 subreddit said they were “playing that first before jumping into MP so I can get a feel for the gunplay.” Another called the campaign mission a cool surprise and said they were counting down to the beta.

That is exactly what I would do. A campaign mission is a much better introduction to unfamiliar gun handling than spawning into multiplayer against somebody who has already spent six hours learning every head-glitch on the map.

The multiplayer looks faster, but thankfully not completely insane

Infinity Ward has rebuilt much of Modern Warfare's movement without adopting Black Ops 7's full Omnimovement system. Image: Activision / Infinity Ward

I have not played Modern Warfare 4 myself, so I am not going to pretend I know exactly how it feels. I have watched the public alpha footage and compared it with hands-on impressions from journalists who played multiplayer earlier this year. The most encouraging thing is that they broadly agree on what has changed.

Infinity Ward seems to have realized that Modern Warfare II pushed “tactical” movement far enough that tactical sometimes became another word for sluggish.

The studio's own developers have admitted as much. Multiplayer design lead Jackie Reynolds told PC Gamer that Modern Warfare II's tactical direction came at the expense of feel and fun, so the team rebuilt movement systems to restore fluidity while keeping Infinity Ward's heavier Modern Warfare identity.

That approach is visible in the footage. Sliding carries more momentum, mantling is faster, players can hang from ledges, climb pipes and reposition around parts of the environment without everything turning into the airborne chaos of Black Ops 7. Infinity Ward describes the goal as giving players freedom without losing the physical quality that separates Modern Warfare from Treyarch's games.

Windows Central's hands-on preview came away with a similar impression. The writer found Modern Warfare 4 slower than the recent Black Ops titles despite its improved slides and mantling, describing it as very clearly a boots-on-the-ground Infinity Ward game rather than another attempt to chase Omnimovement.

That sounds almost ideal to me.

I like fast Call of Duty. I do not particularly like Call of Duty when every firefight looks like two people attempting Olympic gymnastics while carrying assault rifles.

The community is already divided, of course. One Reddit player joked that the current footage looks like “MW3 but we two energy drinks deep,” while another simply said they were not buying another Call of Duty with slide mechanics. Other players have been asking for exactly this kind of faster Modern Warfare since MWII.

That argument is not going away. What matters is whether movement creates options without making enemy players impossible to read.

Infinity Ward's multiplayer director Joe Cecot explained the balancing problem well: movement has to feel good for the person moving, but it also needs to feel fair for the person trying to shoot them. That sounds obvious, yet Call of Duty has spent several years discovering how difficult the balance actually is.

The guns might be the real reason this version feels different

Infinity Ward has given its new weapon system the slightly ridiculous name Ballistic Authority, but I understand what the studio is trying to communicate. Modern Warfare 4 removes weapon bloom, rebuilds recoil and convergence, adjusts how weapons respond to player movement and refines visual effects so firing a gun should feel more directly connected to where bullets actually go.

That sounds technical. In practice, I think it addresses one of the most annoying things about recent Call of Duty gunfights: not always understanding whether you missed because your aim was bad or because the game decided your gun needed another layer of visual chaos.

The early alpha accidentally demonstrated how sensitive players are to that problem. When creators streamed Modern Warfare 4 in July, some weapons produced enormous muzzle flashes and smoke that made targets difficult to see. Clips spread quickly because it looked ridiculous. Infinity Ward responded almost immediately and said the extreme muzzle flash was a bug in the alpha build that would be fixed before beta, while also promising further reductions to muzzle smoke.

I actually take that incident as a positive sign.

Not the bug itself. The bug looked awful.

The good sign is that Infinity Ward did not spend three weeks telling players they were misunderstanding the artistic vision. It acknowledged the problem and said it would change it.

That matters because Modern Warfare 4 will be tested by a player base that is tired of waiting three seasons for obvious problems to be addressed.

The beta will make Ballistic Authority much easier to judge. Activision says players can unlock up to 19 weapons during the test, alongside equipment, perks, Field Upgrades and Killstreaks. The new Gunsmith also shares attachments across weapon classes, while fully leveling weapons unlocks Apex Attachments capable of changing how they behave.

I am especially interested in Apex Attachments. Call of Duty has spent years drowning players in optics, grips and barrels where half the challenge is figuring out whether a tiny statistical difference matters. If Apex Attachments genuinely transform a weapon rather than giving it another 3 percent reduction in horizontal recoil, the progression grind might finally feel worthwhile again.

Kill Block is either a brilliant idea or something I will hate after three matches

One of Modern Warfare 4's stranger multiplayer experiments is Kill Block, a modular combat space inside the fictional Westbridge Training Facility. Instead of playing exactly the same layout every round, parts of the arena reconfigure, changing routes, cover and sightlines. Infinity Ward says the system can create more than 500 different configurations.

That number sounds fantastic in marketing copy. I am more interested in whether players can actually learn the map.

Map knowledge is one of the best parts of multiplayer shooters. Eventually you know where somebody is likely to appear before they appear. You understand rotations and sightlines. A map becomes something you read rather than scenery you run through.

Kill Block deliberately interferes with that.

I can see the appeal. Players have complained for years that multiplayer becomes repetitive because everybody learns the same routes. Changing the arena every round could force teams to think instead of running the same opening route for the 400th time.

It could also become exhausting if the layouts feel random rather than designed.

That is what I want to test most in the beta. Infinity Ward is using Kill Block for expanded Gunfight formats including 3v3 and 10v10, and Activision has confirmed it will be part of the August test.

If it works, it could be one of the few genuinely new multiplayer ideas in Call of Duty that does not depend on making players move faster.

The beta is ridiculously large this year

The August 21 beta is already much bigger than the usual Call of Duty test. Early Access runs through August 25 for players who preorder on PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. The second weekend runs from August 28 through September 1 and opens access to everyone, including Nintendo Switch 2 players.

During that period, Activision is offering standard multiplayer modes including Team Deathmatch, Domination, Hardpoint, Kill Confirmed and Search & Destroy, alongside Kill Block, 3v3 content, 10v10 fighting and a Mobility Course. The first weekend includes the Entrenched campaign mission. The second weekend goes even further by bringing Warzone into a Call of Duty beta for the first time, including the new Zodiac Resurgence map.

That feels less like a beta and more like Activision trying to force everyone to have an opinion about Modern Warfare 4 before September begins.

I think that is deliberate.

Call of Duty does not enter 2026 with unlimited goodwill. There are players who loved Black Ops 7, but last year's game also produced plenty of frustration, and there is obvious fatigue around paying premium prices for another Call of Duty every year. PC Gamer interpreted the unusually large beta as something close to an olive branch to players who may not automatically feel the need to buy another $70 entry.

The community itself reflects that fatigue. One potential new player wrote that Modern Warfare 4 had almost sold them despite having never played Call of Duty before, but questioned the idea of investing in a premium game when another entry could replace it relatively quickly.

That is a fair concern, and one Activision cannot solve with another Operator bundle.

If Modern Warfare 4 wants to convince people that this year's Call of Duty matters, the actual game needs to do the work.

Captain Price is back, but I hope he is not the only reason people care

Captain Price returns as an outlaw operating outside the system he once served. Image: Activision / Infinity Ward

There is a cynical version of Modern Warfare 4 that would be incredibly easy to make. Put Captain Price on everything, bring back familiar names, mention 2009 repeatedly, sell nostalgia and let multiplayer carry the rest.

The campaign setup at least looks more ambitious than that.

Price is still central, but Private Park and the South Korean unit give Infinity Ward another perspective on the conflict. The official story begins with a full-scale invasion of South Korea before expanding into a wider global crisis, with Price pursuing a separate off-book mission that eventually connects to the war.

The setting is politically loaded enough that I am curious how carefully Infinity Ward handles it. Call of Duty has always borrowed the visual language of real conflicts while giving itself enough fictional distance to create enormous action sequences. Modern Warfare 4 appears to be doing that again, with a fictional Korean conflict leading into missions across several countries.

What matters to me is whether Park is allowed to become an actual character instead of somebody standing near Price until Price does something cool.

Infinity Ward has a chance to tell part of the campaign from a perspective Call of Duty rarely uses. I hope it does not waste that.

The reveal trailer has sold the scale. The beta now has to sell the game.

So why is Modern Warfare 4 already top 10 on Steam?

Some of it is simply Call of Duty being Call of Duty. The franchise is enormous, Infinity Ward still carries a lot of weight with Modern Warfare fans, and people know roughly what they are buying.

But I think the preorder momentum also comes from Modern Warfare 4 looking unusually focused.

Infinity Ward is not trying to out-Black-Ops Black Ops. It removed Omnimovement and rebuilt a more grounded movement system. It is fixing weapon visibility instead of adding more visual randomness. Kill Block is an attempt to make map knowledge less automatic. DMZ is returning as a full extraction mode. The campaign is using Korea as a major new setting, and Activision is confident enough in one of those missions to put it directly into the beta.

There are still things I do not love. Some of the movement looks too fast for the grounded tone Infinity Ward keeps talking about. A few of the early maps shown to press were criticized as visually bland, even by PC Gamer's Morgan Park, who otherwise praised Infinity Ward's gunplay. The usual questions around matchmaking, monetization, cheating and yearly Call of Duty fatigue have not magically disappeared.

That is why August 21 matters more than the #9 Steam position.

Right now people are paying for what Modern Warfare 4 might be.

Once the beta opens, the excuses disappear. Thousands of players will be able to judge the movement, recoil, maps and campaign for themselves, and the following open weekend will remove even the preorder barrier.

If the game feels as good as the people who played it early say it does, that current Steam ranking may look small by October.

If it does not, Call of Duty players are exceptionally good at turning excitement into anger within approximately one multiplayer match.

Either outcome should be entertaining.

For now, though, an unreleased $70 Call of Duty is already one of Steam's ten biggest revenue generators, and its biggest public test has not even begun. That tells me something has clearly worked in Infinity Ward's pitch.

On August 21, we find out whether the game can do the same.