While modern day disc-buyers are accustomed to having an additional download the first time they insert their physical copy, Modern Warfare 2 might be taking it too far. According to Does It Play, a social media account working to ensure games remain accessible to all, the disc for this year's Call of Duty contains only 70MB of data.
Because the disc is only 70MB, the download for the world-renowned FPS is a whopping 100GB, and that's before Warzone 2's official release. The original Warzone had a download size of 98GB for the Xbox, forcing many fans to clean out their storage to make room. Requiring almost 200GB of downloads despite having a physical copy has many gamers questioning the point of even buying a physical disc.
Physical copies are a great way to keep your storage space open, but with a 200GB download, players have their choices limited. The PlayStation 5 only has around 667GB of storage total for games, per dataprot.net. That's roughly three Call of Duty games, forcing console owners to either buy an external hard drive or save some of their favorite titles to the cloud for later.
If Activison was only planning to put less than a gigabyte of data on the disc, it calls the question of why they would release one at all. Physical copies of games are just plastic rings in a plastic box, not exactly great for the environment, and the last thing any player wants to do after inserting their brand-new game into their console is wait until the next day — or week depending on their download speeds — to play it.
The gaming industry as a whole is gradually making its way to a more digital-dependent modus operandi. Downloads are a convenient way of saving desk or shelf space, but console storage hasn't exploded like the sizes of the games on them, creating a large disparity.