You may have bought a physical version of Activision’s latest FPS game, but Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 isn’t on the disc except for a very small portion of it – the game launcher. That 70MB install then prompts you to download the rest of the game, all 72GB of it. The choice is a curious one. PS5 and Xbox Series X use discs that can hold up to 100GB of data, well beyond Modern Warfare 2’s standard file size.
Modern Warfare 2 is only 11GB larger than 2021’s Call of Duty Vanguard, which Activision included on the disc so players could install it directly, without a download and the wait that it entails. Sony has yet to remove download speed caps that it implemented during the initial round of COVID-19 lockdowns, so downloading 72GB of data can take hours, to say nothing of taking a chunk out of consumers’ internet data caps.
