Monday, October 31st 2022
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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II Disc Version Doesn't Actually Have the Game on it, Serves as Hardware DRM
So you live in Randomville in the middle of nowhere, with a slow ADSL that's barely a few Mbps fast, and thought you could enjoy Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II on PlayStation 5 with its disc version? Think again. It turns out that the disc version of this game doesn't actually have the game on the disc. That's right, those unlucky enough to buy the disc version found that it only contained 72 MB of data, which when autorun, gets the console to fetch the up to 151 GB of the game's payload over the Internet. The disc only acts like a hardware DRM, in the same way as certain expensive software ship with USB flash drives that need to be plugged in for you to use the software.
After enduring the massive download, you're required to keep the disc inserted to play the game. It is possible to ship the entire game in two 50 GB Blu-ray discs with the best available compression tech. The problem with CoD off-late has been that the developers either forgot how to distribute game patches, or are using the sheer file-size of patches as an anti-piracy measure; with most of them spanning several dozen gigabytes, and major updates even fetching the entire game's triple-figure GB payload all over again. This 72 MB disc-based distribution is below the belt.
Sources:
Lance McDonald (Twitter), Tweaktown
After enduring the massive download, you're required to keep the disc inserted to play the game. It is possible to ship the entire game in two 50 GB Blu-ray discs with the best available compression tech. The problem with CoD off-late has been that the developers either forgot how to distribute game patches, or are using the sheer file-size of patches as an anti-piracy measure; with most of them spanning several dozen gigabytes, and major updates even fetching the entire game's triple-figure GB payload all over again. This 72 MB disc-based distribution is below the belt.
58 Comments on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II Disc Version Doesn't Actually Have the Game on it, Serves as Hardware DRM
If it was "day0" at least you could've played it offline
World of Tanks have had it for multiple years. And I think I've seen the same on some EA games.
There right thing to do is put Net Neutrality back into place, Republican, Democrat, or Independent make it happen.
I'm fortunate where I live to have fiber internet from a city owned utility that continues to promise Net Neutrality, and they live up to it. There are no data caps. In this same area, Comcast competes and has data caps.
They'd install the game on low graphics first, and let you play while hi res textures, cinematics etc were still downloading/install