Black Ops 6 download size – How big will Call of Duty be in 2024?

The highly anticipated Black Ops 6 of 2024 is about to launch into Early Access. The last few years have seen back-to-back Modern Warfare releases in the Call of Duty franchise, but this year marks a return to the Black Ops universe. With ever-improving graphical fidelity and a wealth of interconnected content, download sizes are always a concern for gamers at launch. But this year, the developers are optimizing the Call of Duty experience. Here’s what we know about Black Ops 6’s download size.

The developers have provided an estimate of the download size for Black Ops 6 on various platforms. The size varies from platform to platform and also depends on whether you currently have Call of Duty installed.

But how exactly do they reduce the game size to just 52GB when previous games required up to 213GB of storage?

Image via Call of Duty

On August 15, 2024, Call of Duty published a detailed blog post titled “Optimizing the Call of Duty Experience: A Roadmap to the Launch of Black Ops 6.” The post describes a number of techniques the developers are using to reduce download sizes. And it all starts with the Season 5 Reloaded update.

Season 5 Reloaded will be a larger update than usual content drops, as it completely reorganizes the file structure for CoD. After these large initial downloads, future updates will be smaller and existing files will take up less space on your device. This is crucial to getting Modern Warfare and Warzone up to Black Ops 6’s planned download size. On the technical side, this update also ushers in the implementation of improved texture streaming (see below).

Image via Call of Duty

As part of the effort to reduce file sizes, Call of Duty will be making greater use of texture streaming. But what is texture streaming? – Texture streaming is a technology that allows game assets (such as cosmetic items) to be downloaded (or upscaled from lower resolution files) during live gameplay, rather than having to store them on the computer’s own storage. This reduces memory requirements, but does incur some additional data usage during gameplay.

With the new updates, the use of texture streaming is expanded. To accommodate this change and give players more control, the On-Demand Texture Streaming setting has been split into two options:

While new and returning players can download the Black Ops 6 Open Beta directly, active players will benefit from a much smaller download size and a smoother gameplay experience thanks to the Season 5 Reloaded update. Players who have Call of Duty and the Season 5.5 update installed will automatically receive the beta as an update to their existing installation.

As part of the final preparations for the launch of Black Ops 6, Treyarch will release an updated UI in mid-October. The new experience will introduce a CoD landing zone that simplifies the gameplay experience. The latest annual release and Call of Duty: Warzone will be available directly from the landing zone. Initially, the UI will allow cross-launch in MW3 and Warzone, but later updates will make both games available for immediate launches.