Sick of 'Call of Duty: Modern Warfare' Updates? Here's Why They Keep Coming

If you play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare often you might have noticed that it's a game that receives updates on a regular basis – and more so. It seems to update more often than usual, at least when compared to other games you have installed on your system's hard drive, whether you're playing on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, or PC. It's a solid, exciting shooter, but waiting for yet another update to install when you're ready to play (or are almost out of hard drive space) can be super frustrating. 

For one, updates cut into what may already be limited gaming time. Second, they're often massive. One of the latest updates, in fact, was a massive 51GB on PS4. On Xbox One, it was 64GB. It was even larger than that for PC players: 94GB. Hard drive resources are not infinite, and it's not cheap to buy a new one every so often. So why are there so many huge updates? We've got the scoop straight from part of the development team to make better sense of these massive update chunks. 

Production Director Paul Haile addressed some concerns when he took to Twitter in February 2020, explaining at least why one massive update was the size it was. He stated that it actually contained data that should reduce the game's size overall, which would eventually lead to less, smaller updates – something that hasn't exactly come to pass just yet, but it does at least make sense that the developers are continually working on different kinds of optimization for the game in its current state.

In a further tweet, Paul explained that players would soon be able to keep or delete DLC packs as they saw fit to reduce space. A similar measure was taken in other games as of late, which is a necessary one – most systems start at 1 TB on the cheaper end these days, but games have ballooned in size as part of our digital future. But basically, you can thank frequent, meaty updates for making your game better overall. And it's definitely a massive pain that no one wants to deal with. 

But by the same token, the game itself would likely be running poorly by now if you didn't have to deal with all the annoying updates you have so often. So really, the next time you boot up Modern Warfare and have to wait far too long to jump in-game because of one, remember that things could seriously be so much worse. And the game, in its current state, especially with all its content and Warzone, runs quite smoothly for something completely under such massive load.

Hopefully the next time you get one, though, you won't have to delete all the other games you're currently playing through from your hard drive. That can absolutely be an enormous annoyance when you have a huge backlog.