Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is six dollars on Steam right now. Six. That’s 90% off, the deepest discount the 2023 reboot has ever seen, and it’s enough to push the game to #1 on the Specials chart and #4 among Top Sellers, with 42,000 concurrent players piling in.

The reviews suggest most of them are having a bad time.

The Six-Dollar Obstacle Course

Modern Warfare sits at “Very Positive” on Steam — 81% from roughly 9,600 reviews — but the top-voted recent reviews paint a different picture. One player’s entire experience: download for an hour, launch, get hit with a mandatory update, reboot, wait 20 minutes for shader compilation, load into a match, die immediately, uninstall, refund. Total playtime: 12 minutes.

Others who stuck around long enough to finish the campaign report clearing it in five to six hours, breaks included. At full price that’s $10 per hour of content. At $5.99, the math improves, but the onboarding friction doesn’t. According to multiple reviewers, the install process and shader compilation remain a slog even on modern hardware.

The $15 Counter-Argument

Two slots down on the Specials chart, Red Dead Redemption 2 is 75% off at $14.99. It carries a 92% positive rating from over 307,000 reviews, a Metacritic score of 93, and 30,000 concurrent players. Reviewers with 40, 60, 100 hours still call it essential. One player at the 99-hour mark said no open-world game would look the same again.

That’s the Spring Sale in miniature: a discount so steep it looks irresistible next to a deal that actually is.

The Steam Spring Sale runs through March 26.

Sources