The second and final session of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 beta did not shift the game's Steam concurrent player numbers, Eurogamer reported on August 31, despite wider access and more content than the opening weekend.
The open session added Switch 2 as a platform and dropped the pre-order requirement. It also bundled a sampler of Warzone's next Resurgence map and two Ground War maps alongside every map and mode carried over from the first beta weekend.
None of that beat the beta's high-water mark. The peak concurrent count of 115,145, set over the first weekend that then shed more than half its Steam players in a day, had still not been beaten; the closest the second session came was a little over 113,000 on Friday, which Eurogamer put down to player interest in Warzone.
Those figures cover Steam alone. There was no public visibility into PlayStation 5, Xbox or Switch 2 concurrents, so some or all of those platforms may have seen a bigger turnout in the second weekend. Eurogamer noted that Steam is nonetheless often a good barometer for the performance of a major game, which is what made the flat numbers notable against free access and new content.
A mid-beta overhaul from Infinity Ward
The second weekend also ran on a substantially different build. Movement became the first point of contention once players got hands on the game, with many arguing that its movement speed and abilities produced an uncontrollable pace, and Infinity Ward set out to change several of those parameters to see whether it made a difference.
As an experiment, the developer removed Tactical Sprint by default and tied it to the Blood Rush perk. Tactical Sprint offers a faster sprint speed at the cost of a delay in raising a weapon — a penalty players worked out years ago could be cancelled by sliding out of it, effectively turning one advantage into two. Slides were nerfed alongside it, with distance and speed cut and the slide-to-jump delay increased.
Time to kill drew similar criticism in the first weekend for how fast it felt, and Infinity Ward responded by reducing the damage of every gun in the beta. Taken together with the movement changes, the pace of the game slowed and the time needed to kill an opponent went up.
The patch also reworked spawns, after players spent the opening weekend appearing at random points across the map next to teammates rather than in more predictable positions towards the edges. Killstreaks were made harder to earn, with the required number of kills raised by one across the board to prevent spam.
Eurogamer described the resulting second weekend as considerably different to play, and the scale of the intervention as unusual for a beta. On Steam, at least, it did not translate into a larger audience.