With the new release of the yearly franchise’s 19th consecutive entry, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2022), there is always expected a dire wave of controversy ranging from fan discourse of its bad/good ratings to the depictions of the US army. While there hasn’t been a major nationwide controversy with this franchise since the original Modern Warfare 2 in 2009 with its campaign mission “No Russian”, which put players in the shoes of a terrorist that opens fire on a crowd of civilians in an airport, or 2019’s Modern Warfare reboot altering reality by depicting a real war crime acted by the US and making it Russia’s doing, there’s something about its newest release that may change the gaming industry for the foreseeable future, and not in a good way.
The big headline that has been circulating is that the new game’s physical version only contains 72 MB of data. This means a lot of things despite sounding like a silly non-issue. One problem with this stems from the view of game preservationists and supporters of game preservation like myself; The game requires you to download the full game over the internet no matter how you buy it now, making physical copies of the game literally useless. This also means that there is no longer a base version of the game available; Usually, if a single-player game gets updated continuously, making changes to the games original state and occasionally deteriorating performance, that original state has always been accessible using a physical copy by deleting and redownloading the game without activating the updates, making that game a forever accessible title. This game changes the ability to do that because now the campaign needs to be downloaded over the internet even with its physical copy.
This is also a new low for digital-only games being sold with physical cases. As frequently done by Nintendo, some games are quite big, and surprisingly too large or too expensive to fit onto the minuscule game cartridge used to play a majority of games for the Nintendo Switch, which leads to some titles being sold physically, case and all, but switching out the usual cartridge for a redeemable code containing a license for the game. While this isn’t an ideal practice, it is far superior to what Activision has done. Since it isn’t a code that they provide, but instead a disc, the game’s license remains on that disc, meaning you need to insert it into the console every time you want to play it despite being downloaded 100% from the internet. This also means that if you were to delete the game, you still need that disc to redownload, rather than accessing the game from your console and downloading it from there.
All in all, if trends like this continue, we can expect physical releases of games to die out within 10 years or so.