Activision has shared an update on Call of Duty Black Ops 6’s installation and file size.
Following rumors that the game would come at a massive 300 GB, the official Call of Duty Updates Twitter account shared this statement:
“Correction: The estimated file size currently displayed on the Black Ops 6 pre-order pages does not represent the download size or disk footprint for Black Ops 6.
The sizes as shown include the full installations of Modern Warfare II, Modern Warfare III, Warzone and all relevant content packs, including all localized languages combined which is not representative of a typical player install experience.
Players will be able to download Black Ops 6 at launch without downloading any other Call of Duty titles or all of the language packs .
The actual estimation of the Black Ops 6 file size will be available closer to launch.”
As fans and the games media often do, datamining is a popular way to get information on upcoming video games weeks, months, sometimes even years in advance. Many times, that information also turns out to be completely accurate, since it involves data about the actual game that players will eventually play.
But as we see here, we do have to take some precautions when it comes to relying on such information. As it turns out, the file download sizes that we see come up on digital stores might sometimes be placeholders, and/or reflect games that are still in the process of development and/or optimization.
In this case, we have to believe that Call of Duty Black Ops 6 is mostly, if not completely, finished. Treyarch and Raven Software was given sufficient time to polish the game up and bring it up to the scale that they planned.
So if there are any issues with downloads or installs, it’s not coming from the builds they are preparing for release itself. It’s probably got something to do with Call of Duty Hub, which may need to be adjusted to accommodate the release of a game that’s this important, and is big in that sense.
Now, we will acknowledge that fans are right to have objected to the possibility that a Call of Duty game could be as big as 300 GB. This franchise is made of annualized games, and in spite of the scale of Call of Duty Black Ops 6, there’s an implicit understanding that a new game will come to replace it next year.
We do also think Activision is more reasonable and knows what fans expect. So if anything, Call of Duty Black Ops 6 will be closer to 100 GB, and more likely to be below that.
