Call of Duty could be too big for your PS4 — here's what to do

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Recent Call of Duty will devour a 500GB PS4

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
(Image credit: Activision)

Your vanilla PS4's 500GB hard disc drive could struggle to store all of what most-recent Call of Duty games have to offer. 

Developer Activision has warned users that with fully-updated versions of Black Ops Cold War, Modern Warfare and Warzone, your PS5 might not have space for anything else; if you can even fit all the updates in the first place. There is a solution to the problem though. 

The 500GB PS4 only has 407GB of usable hard drive space. If you have both games fully updated, and complete with all modes and packs installed, the new Season 2 update may be too much for your poor console to handle. 

If you have a 1TB PS4 Slim or PS4 Pro then Call of Duty's hefty game sizes won't be such a problem, but you'd still need to give up a large amount of HDD space. 

For reference, the Black Ops Cold War update is 10.5GB on the console, while the Warzone update is 17.9GB. Those are some hefty updates and mean the two already-bloated games are taking up even more space.

Activision has suggested users delete some “unused Game Content” if they want to successfully install both patches later tonight, with instructions on how to do it.

How to delete unnecessary PS4 Call of Duty content

PS4

(Image credit: Tom's Guide)

In Black Ops Cold War you want to press R3 when you’re on the main menu, and head to File Management. You’ll then be able to delete content you don’t need anymore.

On Modern Warfare/Warzone you want to hit Options on the main menu, then the General tab. Scroll down to Game Installs and you’ll be able to pick and choose what content you want to get rid of.

Activision has only singled out PS4 owners, however, and it’s not clear how Call of Duty’s massive storage requirements will affect those playing on a 500GB Xbox One or Xbox One S. Their updates are even bigger than the PS4’s, needing 15.3GB for Black Ops, and 17.9GB for Warzone. 

In any case, it appears as the process for deleting redundant content is similar to that of Microsoft’s consoles.

Of course, none of this would be necessary if Call of Duty file sizes weren’t so astronomically big. Plenty of other games, including those with next-gen visuals, rarely reach the 100GB mark. 

This might also be the final straw and see you decide you want a PS5 or Xbox Series X. In that case, check out our PS5 restock update tracker article and our where to buy Xbox Series X hub

Tom Pritchard
Tom Pritchard
UK Phones Editor

Tom is the Tom's Guide's UK Phones Editor, tackling the latest smartphone news and vocally expressing his opinions about upcoming features or changes. It's long way from his days as editor of Gizmodo UK, when pretty much everything was on the table. He’s usually found trying to squeeze another giant Lego set onto the shelf, draining very large cups of coffee, or complaining about how terrible his Smart TV is.