Call of Duty is trying to get a lot right this year. First, it promised to curb several distracting crossover skins. Now, after years of complaints from players strapped for hard drive space, Call of Duty has finally addressed one of its most annoying features. And all it seemingly took was a major competitor agreeing not to take advantage of fans who haven’t upgraded their storage space.
Over the holiday weekend, the mandatory Call of Duty HQ app received an update across platforms that reduced its absurdly large file size to more manageable downloads. As first reported by PlayStation Game Size on social media, the current-gen version has the biggest reduction, with the PlayStation 5 version going from 126.2 GB to just 25.4 GB. Last-generation consoles are seeing a smaller reduction, but one that will help nonetheless. PlayStation 4 players will now need just 63 GB instead of 81 GB.
This reduction doesn’t account for the actual games. If you want to play Black Ops 6, you’ll still need to put aside another 100 GBs to account for campaign, multiplayer, zombies, and monthly content. However, removing dozens of gigabytes from a mandatory app that does little for the majority of players is a big step in the right direction. PlayStation Game Size also reported that another update coming in the near future will let players remove just the multiplayer portion of the game, which accounts for another 99 GB of space.
It’s a long-overdue change for the series, and one that I’ve personally wanted for years. If you’re someone who purchased a PlayStation 5 at launch, for example, Call of Duty could quite literally steal more than a third of your available storage space out of the box. While it may be a small price to pay for those who exclusively engage with the shooter all year round, it’s a nightmare for those who actually play other games.
The fact that Call of Duty HQ was ever as large as it was always seemed suspicious. The app is a central hub that lets players launch any modern Call of Duty game they own from a unified interface. It’s been a deeply unnecessary hurdle, especially when players still have to download the games themselves. It’s jarring that you can’t just download Black Ops 6 and play it. You have to download an additional 126 GB for the privilege of starting a game you purchased just because.
While 25 GBs is an improvement, I’d still argue that something as simple as a series of menus and launch prompts shouldn’t equate to the size of entire video games. The fact that this central hub could be reduced so drastically in the first place further sets off my long-standing suspicion that Call of Duty HQ was always a ploy to monopolize players’ systems and keep players from trying other titles.
The timing of this update has some players suspecting they’re only being afforded this long-requested convenience now that Call of Duty has some worthy competition on the way. Last week, DICE confirmed that Battlefield 6 would require 99 GBs to run at its highest settings on PC, a far cry from the more than half the size it takes to play the most recent release in the Call of Duty series. While there’s no way to know when work on this new update began, it does seem like impeccable timing. At the very least, we know that developers have been aware of this complaint for years now. The last few releases have let players remove specific parts of the game if they’d like, just to ease the burden.
While these changes are great for current players of the series, it remains to be seen if Treyarch and Raven Software will carry this forward in the upcoming entry. Black Ops 7 launches in November, and we can only hope that it continues to spare players from losing big chunks of their limited console and PC storage space.
