Players who received early physical copies of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II have reported that the discs included contain only about 72MB of data, forcing players to connect to the internet and download the other 100+ GB of data to actually play the game.
Officially, Modern Warfare II isn’t out until tomorrow. But as usual, a few copies of the upcoming military first-person shooter slipped out of the warehouses a bit early and ended up in the hands of some lucky players. In theory, this disc should contain the game’s campaign, which was released early digitally, and it should also include its multiplayer, which fully launches for all tomorrow on the official release date. But as reported by Eurogamer, that’s not the case. Instead, players who got early copies of Modern Warfare II discovered that the disc was basically empty and they would have to download and install the entire game via the internet before they could play.
Kotaku has reached out to Activision about these dummy discs and if the company plans on offering actual retail copies of the game in the future.
Modern Warfare II–-after the latest patch—is reportedly over 150+ GB large when you include campaign and multiplayer. (And that doesn’t include the yet-to-be-released Warzone 2.0 that’s out in November.) While some players will be able to download the game easily and quickly, for others the large file size could take hours or days to download and it could push them over their existing internet data cap. Another problem, as pointed out by Eurogamer, is that in some parts of the world, energy costs are rising rapidly, and leaving a large, next-gen console running for hours to download a game could be a costly situation.
But even if everyone in the world had great internet, low energy bills, and tons of free time to wait around for MW2 to download, it wouldn’t change how inconvenient this dummy disc situation is. It ends up making it harder to preserve console versions of the game legally, another blow to game preservation. And sure, this isn’t the first time a publisher has shipped nearly empty discs, but it still sucks that it’s happening again as it makes preserving games much, much harder for what is one of the biggest franchises in the world.
Plus, what happens when the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 servers die one day? Well, you can probably guess. Unless Activision changes something in the future, the disc and all 72MB of its data will just become a paperweight once the servers die. At least you can play the other 46 Call of Duty games that are also called Modern Warfare instead.
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