Call of Duty is bringing the $70 game to Steam
Call of Duty is back on Steam with Modern Warfare 2, but now at a higher price.
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.
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Morgan has been writing for PC Gamer since 2018, first as a freelancer and currently as a staff writer. He has also appeared on Polygon, Kotaku, Fanbyte, and PCGamesN. Before freelancing, he spent most of high school and all of college writing at small gaming sites that didn't pay him. He's very happy to have a real job now. Morgan is a beat writer following the latest and greatest shooters and the communities that play them. He also writes general news, reviews, features, the occasional guide, and bad jokes in Slack. Twist his arm, and he'll even write about a boring strategy game. Please don't, though.