Physical copies of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 contain a disc with just 70MB of data inside.
Players who received a copy slightly earlier than tomorrows official multiplayer release are reporting that the disc contains almost no data and is accompanied by a hefty data download.
The latest pre-release update balloons the game to a massive 150GB, which does not yet include Warzone 2.0.
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Such dummy discs have come under severe criticism, as it places the burden on the player to obtain the rest of the game through the internet, which can be a slow and expensive process for those with low internet speeds and data caps. Indeed, this tends to be the primary reason players may opt for a physical copy of a game.
Moreover, with the cost-of-living crisis afflicting much of Europe, the necessity to keep a console on at idle just to download data can become a costly affair. And this doesnt even consider the environmental impact of potentially millions of consoles left on for a download, or the production of millions of discs with no functional use without an internet connection.
Game preservationists also criticise such moves as it prevents players from keeping a hard copy of the single-player campaign long after Sony and Microsoft have shut down their servers.
Unfortunately, this appears to be part of an emerging strategy by Activision to move away from physical releases. The publisher is already incentivising digital pre-orders to gain early-access to the campaign and to purchase the special “vault” edition.
This is very different from the Activision of just a few years ago where players could purchase a special edition of Modern Warfare (2019) which contained disc with the full campaign and night-vision goggles.
Eurogamer has asked Activision for comment.
70mb … pic.twitter.com/NkgamI1VIs
— Does it play? (@DoesItPlay1) October 26, 2022
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