Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War and, in particular, Call of Duty: Warzone helped juice the biggest download day in Virgin Media history last week, as the UK Internet provider cited the franchise as the reason behind an enormous uptick in bandwidth usage. According to the company, the update coincided with a 24-hour period where the average user downloaded more than 20GB of data – which is 3.5GB more than the daily average in 2020.
The update for Call of Duty: Warzone weighed in at 17GB in total, but Eurogamer.net notes that storage woes on PlayStation platforms in particular may have led to some players deleting and redownloading games on the same day; this is because of a curious file unpacking format which requires there to be at least 100GB of spare space before it’ll even download Call of Duty patches.
With more than 85 million players worldwide, these Call of Duty updates are constantly contributing to record bandwidth spikes. Last year, Virgin Media logged unprecedented spikes in peak time traffic twice – and they both coincided with patches being released for the Battle Royale. It doesn’t help, of course, that the franchise is a storage space monster, eating upwards of 300GB if you have both Black Ops Cold War and Warzone installed on your console.
[source eurogamer.net]
Comments 12
"this is because the next-gen console’s curious file unpacking format requires there to be at least 100GB of spare space before it’ll even download Call of Duty patches."
What, why?
Is this a thing on PS4 as well? Am I being stupid or is there a technical reason for this?
Of course it would be COD of all things that would cause this download record though.
@MS7000 It's the same on the PS4, yeah. Many had hoped that it'd be fixed on PS5, but sadly not.
I'll update the article to clarify this is a PlayStation thing, not PS5 specific.
@MS7000 pretty sure it's specifically because Warzone is actually a PS4 game and I believe it's because the PS4 requires a game's files to be written in consecutive sectors on the HDD to ensure faster loading - so it has to make sure that it will be able to combine the original data and patched data in a new space in the storage.
This shouldn't be a requirement when using an SSD but I guess it still does it for compatibility reasons.
I’m not buying another COD until they vastly reduce the size of their games.
Edit: Modern Warfare was the last one I bought. I’m not buying cold war and I deleted MW.
No word about the 90GB Final Fantasy VII freebie?
300 GB is a little ridiculous.
Soon CoD will take half the space of a base PS5 for one release.
@Voltan @get2sammyb Thank you both. Always good to understand a bit more. It certainly explains quite a bit when I was nearing the end of my 2TB on PS4 why it wouldn't accept new patches despite there seemingly being space. =)
It's this update method that makes me dislike SFV on my HD. You're basically downloading the whole game again with every update released.
@OmegaStriver Not buying Cold War either. It's the only COD I don't own due to the file size.
Cold war does not do this unpacking thing on PS5. Not sure about MW but since it's a PS4 game I doubt its patching/update mechanism is going to have changed when it's installed on a PS5.
there were updates for cold war and modern warfare last week, totalling 40gb or so.. if you have them both. the update sizes on these games are ridiculous, particularly MW, infinity ward needs to sort it out..
how many people own GTA V, about 2 squillion? just need rockstar to put out a 50gb for GTA online and wait for Internet to break...
meanwhile, us ps4 players can’t play war zone at all 😕
If it does the file issue on PS5 should Sony work with who ever made COD Warzone to fix that issue on PS5 because it would only use read and write cycles and lower the drives lifespan
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