Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4: What's Actually Confirmed

Modern Warfare 4 is close enough to launch that a lot of specific-sounding information is circulating. This is the subset that comes from Activision's or Sony's own pages, checked on 22 August 2026 — plus, just as usefully, the things that are still not published.

The release date, and a discrepancy worth flagging

Two official sources give two different dates.

Activision's own Steam store listing dates the game 22 October 2026. The PlayStation Blog post published on 21 August 2026 states: "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 launches October 23."

Both are first-party. Neither page reconciles the other. The most likely explanation is the ordinary one — storefront dates and regional launch times often land either side of midnight, and Call of Duty has historically unlocked in the evening of the day before its nominal date in some regions — but that is our inference, not a statement either company has made. Until one of them clarifies, treat the launch as the 22nd-to-23rd of October 2026 and check your own storefront for the local unlock time. Anyone giving you a single confident date is choosing one of two official sources without telling you the other exists.

Price

$69.99 on the Steam listing, in the US market. That is the figure Activision itself is publishing.

Premise

From the store listing's own description: "War erupts on the Korean Peninsula as North Korea launches an invasion that threatens to destabilize the world in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4."

The beta schedule

From the PlayStation Blog post of 21 August 2026:

• Early Access Beta — running through 25 August at 10:00am PT.
• Open Beta, weekend two — 28 August at 10:00am PT through 1 September at 10:00am PT.
• The beta period detailed in that post is PlayStation 5.

Sony also lists what is playable during it: classic 6v6 modes including Team Deathmatch, Domination, Hardpoint, Kill Confirmed and Search and Destroy; two new modes named Inflation and Hijack; a Kill Block mode running in 3v3 and 10v10 Gunfight variants with dynamic map reconfiguration; and Ground War: Combat Outpost, a 24v24 vehicle-and-infantry mode. One campaign mission, "Entrenched", is playable. Twenty-two weapons are available. Progression to level 30 earns eight beta rewards that carry into the full release, and weekend two adds a Warzone Resurgence mode on a new map called Zodiac.

Not published: PC system requirements

This is the most-searched thing about the game and the answer is that Activision has not published it.

As of 22 August 2026, both the minimum and the recommended blocks on the official Steam listing read: "Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system. Additional Notes: TBD."

Two months from a dated launch, there is no published CPU, GPU, memory or storage figure. Any specific Modern Warfare 4 requirement you see quoted right now did not come from that page. For what it is worth as context rather than prediction, the shared Call of Duty HQ listing that current Call of Duty titles install through states "SSD with 161 GB available space at launch" — that is a real published figure for the existing install, not a forecast for this game.

Not confirmed here: subscription availability

We could not verify from a first-party Xbox source, during research for this piece, whether Modern Warfare 4 is a day-one Game Pass title. Xbox Wire's published Game Pass announcements as of 22 August 2026 do not address it. Rather than infer from the pattern of previous years, we are recording it as unverified — if this matters to your purchase, wait for an Xbox Wire post rather than a roundup.

Our existing comparison of what the two subscription services actually include covers how day-one access works on each platform generally.

What is genuinely unknown

• PC system requirements, including storage.
• Whether the 22nd or the 23rd is the operative date in your region.
• Subscription availability at launch.
• Anything about post-launch content beyond the Warzone Resurgence map named for the beta.

When this doesn't matter

If you buy Call of Duty every year regardless, none of the above changes your decision, and the beta is a better use of your time than any preview article including this one.

If you play exclusively on console, the missing PC requirements are irrelevant to you — the platform holders certify the hardware and the game will run.

And if you are building or upgrading a PC specifically to play this game, the honest advice is to wait. Building against unpublished requirements means building against a guess, and there is a dated launch two months away that will replace the guess with a number.