The Modern Warfare 2 PS5 disc has 70 whole megabytes of data
Physicals media for predominantly online games makes less and less sense as time goes on, but Modern Warfare 2 may be going too far.
Modern Warfare 2 launches worldwide tomorrow, or technically in a few hours in some parts of the world. The physical version of the game is available for sale at retailers, and some have already started shipping it out to customers.
What you may not have counted on, however, is for the blu-ray disc to contain nothing more than a license to start the download. At least, that's case here.
The disc-based version of Modern Warfare 2, specifically the PS5 version, has been discovered to contain only 70mb of data. That's about enough for... a texture? In other words, you'll need to download the entire game once you have your copy, because Activision shipped out practically empty discs.
The discovery was shared by YouTuber Destruction Games, who posted the findings of a Discord member who spotted it on Twitter. The creator is part of the Does it play? collective, which tests physical games to see if they can be played without an internet connection.
As he points out, most games - even those with massive day one patches - tend to have some data on the disc. Indeed, for games with multiple different modes, you can at least count on the single-player to playable offline when the disc is inserted, even if you have to put up with bugs and other issues for playing an unpatched version.
However, more and more games, particularly the AAA variety, have been slowly moving away from that, opting to instead ship the bare minimum on disc. This is less of an issue for people who get the disc early, as there's still time to download the game.
But players who get their PS5 copies at launch, or weeks afterwards, will be in for a shocker. It's an even bigger problem for countries where data caps are the norm, or remote areas where internet speeds are slow enough that it could take days to fully download a game as big as Modern Warfare 2.
Whether or not you opted to go digital, here's all the content you can expect at launch in Modern Warfare 2. While you wait for multiplayer to go live in your country, don't be tempted to change your console's region to play early, and go read our campaign review instead.