Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Warzone and Modern Warfare might not fit on PS4 anymore

Do you own a 500GB PS4? If you have Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Warzone installed, Activision has warned that you may “need to make room” if you want to successfully update all versions of the game.

In a post on the Call of Duty blog, a section called “PlayStation 4 Players: File Size and Making Space” outlines that those who own the standard PS4, which is equipped with a 500GB hard drive, may need to delete some unused ‘Game Content’.

The publisher has provided a guide for users who wish to purge every game from their PS4 hard drive that isn’t Call of Duty, but it once again begs the question: why is Call of Duty’s file size so extraordinarily large?

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If your 500GB hard drive is fit to burst, then, but you’d like to play the latest updates, here’s what you’ll need to do. 

In Black Ops Cold War, press R3 (press in the right analog stick) in the main menu and go to “File Management”. You can then delete any content that you may not have played in a while. In Modern Warfare/Warzone, press options in the main menu, select the “General” tab and then scroll down to “Game Installs”. From here, you can delete any content you’d like to remove. You can further information here.

Activision’s post goes on to say “remember that the Warzone download is not necessary if you are only playing Black Ops Cold War and vice versa”, which is all well and good if you don’t mind reinstalling massive file sizes, and have the internet connection to do so speedily.

Of course, the PS4 does support external hard drives and the internal drive can also be swapped out for a higher capacity alternative. However, it’s yet another egregious example of Call of Duty’s inability to compress and properly manage its file sizes so that, you know, gamers can have something other than Activision’s annualized shooter installed.

Tight squeeze 

It also raises some red flags over the storage situation on next-gen consoles, specifically the PS5 and Xbox Series S. While both support external storage, you need to install PS5 and Xbox Series S optimized games onto the internal drive if you wish to play them. With the PS5 only giving players 664GB of usable storage and no solution to expand it currently, that space is looking all the more meager. (The Xbox Series X has 802GB for comparison.)

The Xbox Series S has even less usable storage available, with just 364GB for users to access. However, Microsoft at least has a storage solution on the market thanks to the Seagate 1TB Expansion Card, which slots into the back of the system. It doesn’t come cheap, though, costing $220 / £220 / AU$315, which is almost as much as the Xbox Series S itself.

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