Call of Duty players have to download the whole game — even with the disc

CALL of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 releases today. But fans who bought a physical copy have found out that they still have to download the whole game.

Many fans of big franchises usually buy physical copies of games, to save space on their consoles, and be able to preserve the game.

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Physical copies have the advantage that you can still play your games decades after release, even once the console’s store has shut down.

However, the disc for the much anticipated Modern Warfare 2 does not contain the game.

It only holds a tiny 70MB of data that is used to open the launcher to download the full game.

This doesn’t mean that players will have to buy the game twice, but it does mean that physical owners will still have a huge download on launch.

The game is a massive 72GB of data which can take several hours to download to your console.

Consoles contain limited amounts of storage, and buying physically can be a good way to save storage space.

PlayStation 5 owners have 670GB of data capacity, so the Call of Duty download will take up around 11 per cent of their storage space.

Smaller consoles, such as the Xbox Series S, offer just 364GB of storage, meaning that Modern Warfare 2 will take up almost 20 per cent of the console’s memory.

Head of Xbox Gaming Phil Spencer recently announced that if Microsoft is able to purchase Activision, he wants to bring Call of Duty to Nintendo Switch.

The Switch has incredibly limited storage space, with most owners choosing to upgrade the storage with micro SD cards.

Micro SD cards with large amounts of storage can be very expensive, costing up to £100.

While discs, like the ones the PS5 and Xbox Series consoles can read, can hold up to 100GB of data, Switch cartridges can only hold just 32GB.

This means that a game like Call of Duty would not fit on a Switch cartridge and would require a download to play.

Some games manage this by releasing a version of the game with less content on Switch, such as FIFA 23 and the Switch Legacy Edition.

Written by Georgina Young on behalf of GLHF.

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