Call of Duty: Warzone are well aware of its huge install sizes, which has been an ongoing issue for a long time now. At one point, PS4 players were told they couldn’t install Modern Warfare/Warzone and Black Ops Cold War unless they freed up space on their 500 GB drives.
A Raven Software dev now says that cycling older maps for Warzone is unlikely to happen due to the storage limitations of older consoles. Live operations lead John Bridge was asked about older maps coming back, and he was blunt and straightforward on the subject.
“We want that. We all want that. There’s a technical problem. The install and reinstall sizes are f**king crazy,” said Bridge. He added that ” we lose players” after each Call of Duty: Warzone map update, which can easily weigh in at around 50 GB.
With game installs ranging from 50 to 180 GB, it is understandable that owners may be annoyed. Some have even reported that the game was taking over 200 GB at one point but was reduced, thankfully, after an optimization update that shaved off just over 10 GB.
Source: PC Gamer
But that's the luxury they get to work in today vs 20+ years ago when a game/software/program had a hard limit on it's storage size.
It's been an arms race between CoD and Battlefield. Anything that doesn't result in more shiney on the screen or more action at the controller is definitely prioritized out - and install space is one of them. I'm sure either Activision or EA would be perfectly fine if CoD/BF bloated to the point where it was the only thing you could have installed on a standard console drive.