Call of Duty Black Ops 6 outperforms Modern Warfare 3 launch

Many fans have said that Call of Duty is back, and it looks like Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 proves them right as it's already outperforming previous games on release day.

Whether it's because the game has A campaign that is well rated or that people are just excited about the gameplay, Treyarch's latest entry in the CoD series has already peaked with over 229,000 players on Steam on its first day. That's well above Modern Warfare 3's 190,273 players when it launched in 2023 and is approaching Modern Warfare 2's peak of 262,875 players in 2022, it says Steam charts And Dexerto.

This is big news for Call of Duty as it has been slowly losing players since the release of MW3 last year despite Warzone being present on the HQ launcher. Prior to the release of BO6, CoD's Steam numbers had reached an average of 57,376 average players – which is close to a new all-time low, still held by the September 2023 average of 55,145.

Ahead of the weekend's likely spike in numbers, BO6 is already in the top five games by player count on Steam, just behind PUBG. This puts it ahead of other popular shooters such as Deadlock and Apex Legends.

These numbers do not reflect the large Call of Duty audience playing on consoles and are further diluted this year as BO6 is the first Call of Duty game available daily on Xbox Game Pass. This means that for the first time since Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard, players will be able to subscribe to Game Pass Ultimate and access the game on Xbox and PC at no additional cost.

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In keeping with the increasing Steam numbers, BO6 is also the top game on Twitch at launch with over 370,000 viewers. Player and viewer numbers for this game should continue to increase over the course of the release weekend, and it looks like Microsoft and Activision have finally given players what they've been wanting.