Don't buy a physical copy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 — here's why

Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 hits the battlefield this Friday, October 28, 2022. If you pre-ordered the title, you've been able to play its campaign for a week and get a taste of what's to come when the full game becomes available Friday. Sadly, if you purchased a physical copy of the CoD Modern Warfare 2, you'll be saving yourself about a nanosecond of download time compared to your digital-only counterparts.

According to a report at Eurogamer,  the physical disks for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 contain only 70MB of data on them. That tiny amount basically means the disks are physical DRM keys and nothing more.

Users will have to download the rest of the game over the internet and as is typically the case with CoD, it's a doozy. The download is reportedly over 150GB, and Eurogamer noted that that's based on the pre-release update, which is 150GB, minus Warzone 2.0. So you may be in for a slightly larger download come release day.

Why this is an issue?

Although it's common practice for physical disks of games to act as keys, the practice of placing virtually nothing else on the disk has come under fire. If you aren't offsetting some of the overall download then why make them? They just add to the company's and consumer's carbon footprint while leaving buyers to wait just as long and burn through just as much data to download the actual game. 

Sure, most games require some downloads for patches and updates, but it used to be when you purchased a physical copy of a title, you owned a full version of it and could play at least some version of the game without an additional download. The old approach saved gamers time and probably some money on their electric bills. Now before this becomes an old man shakes fist at cloud meme, I get that every game needs updates and bug fixes, but I think it's fair to expect some benefit to a physical disk to justify its existence. 

Sell a cardboard or paper code at the store if people need an in-person purchase, but why go through the trouble to produce and ship disks and the associated packaging if they are for all intents and purposes blank? Save the planet from another **** ton of plastic that will eventually end up floating in the Pacific. 

Many game studios have been switching to a purely download system, and why Infinity Ward, the developers behind CoD, chose to even offer a physical copy with just 70MB of data on it is baffling and a massive waste of consumers' time. 

That all said, we will see you all on the battlefield come this Friday!