Call of Duty Steam player counts slip, but remain a major force

Call of Duty’s PC crowd cooled in April, but the franchise is still operating on a scale most shooters never reach. Steam Charts listed an average of 30,764.8 players for April 2026, with a monthly peak of 56,600, while March sat at 30,260.3 average players. Dexerto’s read on the same trend put April at 30,224, down from 31,557 in March. That is a small slide, not a crash, but it tells a clear story for everyday matches: the massive Verdansk-era return has faded, and the game is no longer riding the same wave of fresh-to-warzone energy that briefly flooded lobbies in 2025.

For players loading into Resurgence, Ranked Play, or standard battle royale, that softer level matters less as a headline than as a feeling. A healthier peak often means more returning players, more variety in skill levels, and more noise around a new season. A lower, steadier band usually means more familiar lobbies and fewer surprise surges. Call of Duty is still far from quiet on Steam, but April’s numbers suggest the momentum is settling into a more ordinary rhythm after the shock spike that followed Verdansk’s comeback.

That 2025 surge was the benchmark. Steam Charts showed April 2025 averaging 69,431.4 players, up sharply from March’s 44,613.3, with the month’s peak hitting 138,335. On April 3, 2025, Call of Duty passed 114,000 concurrent Steam players as Verdansk returned, and a separate report put the spike at 113,812 concurrent players alongside 352,640 Twitch viewers. Activision said Verdansk was rebuilt from the ground up for its April 3, 2025 return with Black Ops 6 Season 03, turning the map’s comeback into one of the biggest live-service moments the series has seen on PC.

Raven Software’s Pete Actipis said Verdansk was brought back “for a reason,” called it “the beginning of the Verdansk 2025 journey,” and said it would stay in Warzone “for the time being.” That confidence still matters now because the current player count has to be judged against that high-water mark, not against a vacuum. Verdansk originally anchored Warzone from March 2020 until December 2021, when Caldera took over, and Season 03 Reloaded kept the map active with additions like a moving train, High Value Loot Zones, and a Ranked Play Battle Royale cap of 150 players. The April 2026 dip does not change Call of Duty’s scale, but it does show that the post-Verdansk peak has settled, and every new season will now be judged on whether it can pull players back into that same kind of momentum.