Black Ops 6 brings Call of Duty back to Steam’s top five most played games

Predicting that a Call of Duty launch is going to become one the year’s biggest is about as easy as it gets, but that’s not always the case on PC. For years, Call of Duty’s presence on PC didn’t really factor into its popularity, but things have changed with the release of the Modern Warfare 2019 reboot.

Five years later, and we have one of Call of Duty’s biggest launches on PC in Black Ops 6. It was big enough to push the dreaded Call of Duty app/umbrella to the top of the Steam charts.

If you’ve been keeping an eye on Steam’s top sellers list, this news wouldn’t be entirely surprising. Black Ops 6 has spent the last four weeks as the platform’s number one seller, having climbed a whopping 31 places as we got closer to the release date.

Although sales for individual titles are clear to delineate, the player base for each game is much harder to nail down. Ever Since Activision decided to lump all Call of Duty games under the same Call of Duty banner on Steam and elsewhere, the player numbers started reflecting the year’s new game, Warzone, and every game before it that can be launched from the app.

Nevertheless, the jump in player activity is plain to see. Call of Duty has been averaging 60-70,000 players at its peak concurrent every day. The launch of Black Ops 6 pushed that to just under 250,000, and it has been rising since.

According to SteamDB, the most recent highest peak concurrent has been 306,460, which is very much enough to land the game in Steam’s top five list of most played games, and puts it well ahead of last year’s Modern Warfare 3. This is all incredibly impressive when you consider that a chunk of the audience remains on Battle.net, where Call of Duty used to be exclusively available on PC.

The big change this year, of course, is the game’s day-and-date launch on Game Pass across PC and Xbox, which means there’s potentially a much larger audience of players that aren’t on Steam, and thus don’t factor into these numbers.

Seeing as Warzone is getting some new updates to coincidence with Season 1, it’s likely the numbers will see another bump then, too, assuming they continue to be high enough at this launch period.

If you’re enjoying Black Ops 6 multiplayer, you should definitely give the single-player campaign a shot. It has something of an unusual structure for a Call of Duty campaign, and even a few puzzles that we can help you solve.