Last week’s Call of Duty: Warzone Season 2 update fuelled Virgin Media’s biggest download day on record.
Virgin Media said the battle royale’s update, which launched on 25th February, contributed to a 24-hour period in which the average user downloaded more than 20GB of data. That’s nearly 3.5GB more than the already record-breaking daily average of 2020.
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The Season 2 download weighed in at around 17GB. This was the update that came alongside a warning from Activision that those who own a standard PlayStation 4 with a default hard-drive of 500GB may need to make room if they have the full versions of Modern Warfare, Warzone and Black Ops Cold War with all modes and packs installed.
Exacerbating the problem on PlayStation consoles at least, the Warzone Season 2 update required over 100GB of clear space before the 17GB download would start. In my case, this forced me to delete games installed on my PlayStation 5 SSD, which I subsequently re-downloaded after the Warzone update installed. Redownloading PS5 games (currently there’s no way to move PS5 games of the SSD, remember) en masse will have contributed to Virgin Media’s spike in traffic.
Call of Duty has for a couple of years now updated the shooter with monstrous downloads. Activision has said it’s working to mitigate this, and it does make hefty updates available to “pre-download” to spread the load, but this feature is not available on all platforms.