Call of Duty is bringing the $70 game to Steam

After years of exclusivity on Blizzard's Battle.net platform, Call of Duty will finally make a return to Steam with this year's Modern Warfare 2 (not to be confused with 2009's Modern Warfare 2, a completely different game). That's great news for folks that like to have their games all in one place, but it's a bittersweet celebration—Modern Warfare 2 will also be the first major game to charge $70 for its standard edition on Steam.

Games are getting more expensive. At least that's a norm that videogame publishers are trying to push. Sony has been spearheading the $70 price for a couple of years now with its exclusive PS5 games and some third-party publishers have also dipped their toes into the extra ten dollar ask, like Square Enix with Final Fantasy 7 Remake on the Epic Games Store. Activision has been charging $70 for the current gen console version of Call of Duty for the last two years, but Modern Warfare 2 is the first time that price will extend to the PC.

The PC has long been a holdout for arbitrary game price increases. For a long time after the standard console game price rose to $60 here in the US, PC prices still hovered around $50. That eventually gave way to the $60 standard for big-budget games like CoD. Now that the new ask is $70, Activision is including the PC in its effort to brute force a higher price, too. Bummer.

If you're itching to break triple digits to buy a single videogame, Activision is also offering the $99.99 Vault Edition of Modern Warfare 2, which comes with a few more operator skins, access to the Season 1 battle pass, and 50 tier skips for that battle pass. I'm not sure why you'd decide you wanna skip the first 50 tiers of a pass months before the game is even out, but it's an option.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, not to be confused with the old 2009 game, is coming out on October 28. Today, Activision premiered a "world reveal" trailer that gave us the first glimpse at its campaign.