Call of Duty Just Earned Its Best Steam Rating in 10 Years — and the Multiplayer Isn't Even Out Yet

The last time Call of Duty made PC players this happy, I was young enough to still feel moral guilt about spawn-camping.

This is real, by the way. Not a trailer cut. Not an influencer's early-access love letter. *Steam reviews*, written by actual players who paid actual money. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 has cracked 87% positive on Steam from 2,000+ reviews — and yesterday it was sitting at 81%. You know what's the last Call of Duty to touch numbers like these? Black Ops III. From *2015*. I've seen toddlers start school and graduate since then.

Let me put the pain in perspective, because the contrast is the story. The last few years of COD on Steam read like a hospital chart:

Black Ops 7 — 39% positive. Thirty-nine. That is a rating you frame and hang up as a warning.
Black Ops 6 — 46%.
Modern Warfare III — 48%.

And Modern Warfare III's campaign is widely considered one of the worst the series ever shipped, which makes this turnaround genuinely funny. Same lineage, same studio lineage, same Activision boardroom. Somebody at Infinity Ward clearly sat down after MWIII and said, "Right. Let's not do that again."

The one giant asterisk

Here's the thing, and I want to be straight with you, because every other site is too busy sprinting to "COD IS BACK" for the clicks: *nobody has played the multiplayer yet*.

This rating is campaign-only. The campaign early access went live October 16 for digital pre-order owners — a week before the real launch on October 23, when multiplayer, DMZ, and ranked drop. Everything that makes Call of Duty's Steam page a smoldering crater — network code, SBMM rage, server stability, cheaters — is a multiplayer problem. This rating will move. History says it moves *down*.

But here's my honest take: it still matters. A good campaign isn't supposed to fix multiplayer. It was never going to. What it does is prove Infinity Ward still knows how to make a shooter feel like an event. The campaign closes out the rebooted Modern Warfare storyline that started in 2019 — Private Park and a mixed South Korean–American squad holding the line after an EMP strike on Seoul, and Captain Price running off-leash in the dark across the Korean Peninsula, New York, Paris, Mumbai. That's the kind of globe-hopping set-piece nonsense COD does better than anyone when it bothers to try.

Should you care? (The shelf test)

Quick gut-check for the folks here on CoolGameShelf: if your shooting happens mostly on the Call of Duty: Mobile side of the shelf — we've got it listed, go look — this news doesn't change your Tuesday. CODM is its own universe with its own rhythm.

But if you've ever watched a COD PC launch from the sidelines with popcorn, this is the rare "huh, actually?" moment. After years of the franchise being a punchline on Steam, the community showed up early, paid full price for a campaign-only week, and still left happy. That's not nothing. That's the audience saying: *we're still here, we just want to like your game again*.

October 23 is the real exam. Multiplayer. DMZ. The sweats in ranked. I'll be watching the Steam rating like a hawk that day, and so should you.

*Sources: Insider Gaming; Unboxholics (via SteamDB); GuruGamer; Tech4Gamers.*