Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, being both a major game release and a huge game in download size, has been eating up my internet for the last week. It seems that's true of most of the US too, according to Comcast.
Internet provider Comcast recently put out a statement (via The Verge) reporting the "biggest week in internet history". In this, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 accounts for 19% of all network traffic coming up to its launch.
Nearly a third of Comcast's data was just Call of Duty and Thursday Night Football, which is a pretty huge amount of its total data. Figures aren't available on last year's Call of Duty launch, though it didn't have as big a launch as Black Ops 6.
Importantly, Comcast only gives its Xfinity users 1.2 TB of data with its plans, so customers do have to choose how they spend their data when it comes to huge releases like this.
As pointed out in the Black Ops 6 system requirements before launch, the game itself on Steam is over 120 GB but can be much more with extra packs post-launch and previous Call of Duty games. This means that not only are Comcast customers choosing to play the game en masse but many of them are effectively choosing to do that over other uses of their data. That Comcast limit is a monthly cap, and I would have gone significantly over 1.2 TB of data just this month as I bought a new PC and decided to cram pretty much every game I could fit onto my new SSD.
However, a silver lining in this report is that Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 actually seems worth playing this year. From spending some time getting through the campaign and taking on zombies, it's the most I've enjoyed the game basically since the invention of COD HQ a few years ago.
This file size problem has only gotten worse since launch, as Treyarch launched Nuketown amid complaints about maps and spawn points. Despite the game launching on Xbox Game Pass, it still seems to be outselling the previous Call of Duty, which was, admittedly pretty terrible. Hopefully, this big launch will see greater support throughout the year, even if Comcast's monthly limit may get in the way.
