Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone 2 have been super popular during the first weeks after release. But how many people are actually playing MW2 and WZ2 today?
Warzone has been one of the most successful games of the last few years, and one of the most successful Battle Royale's of all time – so we weren't surprised that along with the record start of Modern Warfare 2 also Warzone 2 became extremely popular – at least during the first weeks.
Now, about half a year after the official release, things look a bit different when it comes to the number of people playing MW2 or Warzone 2. Both games are still popular, but the player numbers have dropped heavily.
To be fair, this is not unusual, since every game loses some popularity after the initial hype, but when it comes to the latest CoD games, there may be additional reasons (more on that at the end of the article). But let's look at the current numbers first.
CoD Player Count: How Many People Are Playing MW2 & Warzone 2?
Unsurprisingly, MW2 and Warzone 2 were most popular during the first weeks after the release, so in November 2022. According to Steam, about 224,000 people played the game on average in November, with an all-time peak of 488,897 players.
About half a year later, the number of average players shrunk down to less than 90,000 in the last 30 days (peaking at about 157,000 players). This means that the games lost more than half of the player base compared to the launch weeks.
It's important to note that you would have to add the players from Battle.net, Xbox and PlayStation to get the overall number of all players, which is hard since Sony and Microsoft don't offer a detailed player count monitoring option like Steam does.
But since the content is the same on all platforms and both Warzone 2 and MW2 are crossplay, it's likely that the player curve will be similar across platforms. Why Modern Warfare 2 And Warzone 2 Have Lost Many Players
To be fair, 90,000 active players is still a quite high number, especially if you compare it to some other games. For example, Battlefield 2042 has only about 10 percent of the player base that MW2 & WZ2 have on Steam.
Additionally, there are also way less people watching MW2 and Warzone 2 on Twitch. The drop-off in viewership is even steeper than the loss in players. At its peak, MW2 had 751,937 viewers on Twitch, now it peaked at 51,373.
Besides the already mentioned usual player and viewer drop beginning shortly after a game's launch, many players were not happy with some changes that Warzone 2 has made, with some of them even claiming that Warzone 2 is already dead.
Furthermore, the second season was delayed for a full month, and probably not every player was willing to wait another four weeks to finally see some new content in the game.
In the end, the decreasing number of people playing Call of Duty MW2 and Warzone 2 is most likely a combination of several effects mentioned in this article.
It will be interesting to see whether Activision is able to change the games in a way that they attract more people again. And even if not – CoD 2023 is already on the way.