Call of Duty Modern Warfare GB size

Modern Warfare has been out for almost two years, and after continuous updates, the game takes up a huge amount of space. Here’s why Modern Warfare’s file size is so huge.

Modern Warfare started life with a massive 175GB requirement to store on drives, making it one of the biggest games ever. While fans assumed that Infinity Ward would work to greatly reduce this number, continuous updates have pushed it higher and higher, and despite their best efforts, it still takes requires the same space as it did at launch.

Obviously, this is a huge amount of space for a game to take up, so players have been trying to figure out why it needs to take such a significant chunk of your drives. Here’s everything we know about why Modern Warfare is so big.

Why does Modern Warfare take up so much space?

File size has always been an issue for Infinity Ward with Modern Warfare. Back in February 2020, one of the game’s producers apologized on Twitter about the size of updates, saying that the team were “constantly trying to fight back against both download size and disk footprint,” as they dropped asset packs to try and reduce the overall size.

The devs tried again in March 2021, reducing the game by 30.6GB, but that just brought it back to 175GB, and still suggested it would need more for mandatory updates.

Read More: When is the next Cold War & Warzone Double XP event?

As for why it’s so large, Infinity Ward have never said officially, but there are plenty of theories. In general, the most accepted idea is the fact that Modern Warfare has too many assets. Some players suggest that holding the cosmetics from the store along with un-compressed textures for maps are what cause these issues, while others believe that Infinity Ward simply didn’t do enough to compress the game down.

Thankfully, there are some ways to bring this number down a little. If you don’t play Modern Warfare multiplayer much, you can choose to delete the game without losing Warzone, while you can choose to uninstall specific portions of the game if you no longer play that mode.

Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that Infinity Ward will reduce the file size any further now, with the game rapidly approaching it’s second birthday. We can only hope that the developers learn some lessons from this game, and their next offering isn’t so hard-drive hungry.

For more, check out which Modern Warfare packs you need to play multiplayer.

Image Credits: Infinity Ward / Activision

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare just got an update, patch 1.23.0. The patch adds the newly increased 200 player count to Warzone’s Verdansk map, but it also balloons Modern Warfare’s install footprint to well over 200 gigabytes. The game may not even fit on a 250 GB SSD anymore.

Shortly after the update, Redditor vanillaricethrowaway posted a screengrab of the Modern Warfare install folder on their PC, which showed a total size of 209 GB. That’s even bigger than initial estimates for Modern Warfare + Warzone on PC, which put the total install size at around 197 GB. When Warzone arrived, it wound up needing less space than anticipated, but the game has added new modes and other additional content with its battle passes, and the amount of space it takes up now has officially become enormous.

To verify, I checked my own Modern Warfare folder, and it’s even worse: Modern Warfare is taking up 235 GB on my older HDD. That’s a bit on the excessive side, even now as storage typically comes in terabyte-plus sizes.

Games are getting bigger across the board, but Modern Warfare is far beyond just about everything else. Even Destiny 2, with all the additional Shadowkeep content installed, hasn’t yet cracked the 100 GB mark on PC (despite early estimates of 165 GB).

The Reddit thread offers several theories as to why Call of Duty: Warzone takes up so much space, most having to do with uncompressed data being easier to process on lower-end systems. Whatever the reason, though, it’s forcing me – and probably plenty of other players – to think hard about how I want to budget my storage space.

Of course, if you’re sticking with it, you’ll want to know about the best Warzone assault rifle, and the best Warzone loadouts – and we’ve got you covered. Can you run it? Take the Call of Duty Warzone system requirements test at PCGameBenchmark.

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