Physical copies of Modern Warfare 2 for consoles ship with no game on the disc

While the PC gaming market shifted over to digital games years ago, many console owners still buy physical discs. However, we are now starting to see publishers pulling back on physical releases. This year for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, Activision chose to put almost no data on the physical Xbox and PlayStation discs. 

According to Does It Play, an outlet that tests physical games for offline play, the physical copy of Modern Warfare 2 for PS5 ships with just 72MB of data on it, essentially forcing owners of the disc version to sit through a massive download. This could have been to prevent leaks, but given that the entire campaign was playable for a week prior to launch, that likely isn't the case here.

70mb … pic.twitter.com/NkgamI1VIs

— Does it play? (@DoesItPlay1) October 26, 2022

For reference, the UHD blu-ray used for PS5 games can store up to 100GB of data, so at the very least, the physical disc should have shipped with the campaign on it, with multiplayer and other modes like Warzone being optional downloads.

This also means that anyone who bought the disc version to skip a potentially lengthy download will be in for an unfortunate surprise. While this is a practice that has been occurring for PC games for years, this is one of the first major instances of a console game disc storing essentially no data.

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KitGuru Says: This does make the MW2 console disc seem like a waste of resources. The disc is effectively useless and offers zero benefits over the digital download. Even the people only interested in buying physical games for their shelves would probably still like to have a functioning game on the disc. 

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