Call of Duty’s Steam numbers are struggling

It isn’t only Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare’s boxed sales numbers that are lagging.

Steam tracking site GitHyp reveals that the latest installment in the FPS series peaked at just 15,280 players during its launch weekend. That made it only the 27th most played game on Steam in the period.

For comparison, its predecessor Black Ops III peaked at 63, 681 in its first weekend, ranking as the fourth most played game on the service. Infinite Warfare is also tracking behind older titles such as PayDay 2 and Rainbow Six Siege.

Twitch views, too, are down – 109k versus 101k.

There are caveats, of course. For one, Modern Warfare Remastered was an added extra with the Legacy Edition of Infinite Warfare, although numbers for that are even lower, sitting at just under 5,000.

It seems very unlikely, though, that the Windows 10 version, which cannot connect with Steam players, had dented the numbers. Apparently one consumer got a refund on that particular release after he found just two other players looking for a game in its multiplayer lobby.

Bear in mind, too, that Black Ops III got off to a slow start but eventually went on to outsell its predecessor Advanced Warfare, so a slow start might not necessarily paint the full picture.

But a slow start it has been – physical sales of the game in the UK were down nearly 50 per cent year on year.