Jokes about the size of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare have been running for some months. Last year before launch, the company requested that end-users reserve up to 175GB of SSD space for the game, but promised that the final version would be smaller.
That promise has been merrily obliterated. First, the game hit that 175GB limit. Then, an August update pushed it over the 200GB limit. Now we’ve hit the point where Call of Duty literally fills a 250GB SSD to the very brim.
@CallofDuty MW nolonger fits onto a 250GB SSD and cannot be updated…..@Activision @Blizzard_Ent please split up SP, MP and Warzone. pic.twitter.com/pSZdlSldvK
— Battle(non)sense (@BattleNonSense) October 3, 2020
This is absurd. If the recent rumors about the PS5 having ~660GB of usable storage are true, Activision believes CoD deserves to eat 1/3 of your storage space for a game that came out a year ago. Given that video game sizes typically increase with every generation, it would scarcely be surprising if Activision just claims the entire available partition for itself and recommends you buy additional storage if you want to play anything else.
I’ll admit, I’m exaggerating there, but only by a little. On console, players can choose if they want to install the COD single-player campaign, a co-operative mode (Special Ops), or Warzone, which grafts battle royale tactics on to CoD-style gameplay. On PC, they can’t.
Games Can Be Too Big
We don’t normally think about storage as a problem for gaming, beyond grumbling about needing to remove a game or two to fit a new one. But blowing past the 250GB mark means that games are now exceeding the capacity of a lot of SSDs that were sold and shipped in OEM systems as primary storage up to and including today. Manufacturers have largely focused on adding faster SSDs and emphasizing cloud services as opposed to simply shipping large SSDs.
Computers ship with far faster storage than they once did — but also far less of it.
Alienware’s M15 R3 starts at 256GB of storage for $1,499. 512GB will cost you $1,649, though some other upgrades are included. For 1TB, you’ve got to go up to a $2,199 base price.
Developers should not build games that require more storage space than the entire drive capacity OEMs are selling. If you bought a $1,449 Alienware and brought it home, you’d discover yourself literally unable to play CoD because Activision finds it inconvenient to support PC players with modular installs.
The 128GB SSDs that were popular at the beginning of SSD adoption are, yes, now too small for anything but very light use. But 256GB drives are still being sold as mainline storage in $1,000+ machines. It’s not as if ignoring this fact is in Activision’s best interests. If someone buys a $1,500 PC, brings it home, and discovers they have to fork over more cash to play one game — plus deal with the headache of a laptop with attached external storage — they’re not going to be all that happy.
It’s long past time to deal with this problem. Give PC gamers the same option to remove components of the game they don’t want to play that you’ve extended to console players.
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