Doom: The Dark Ages discs contain almost no data, require full game downloads

[Daniel Sims]

Cutting corners: Gamers who purchase physical copies of Doom: The Dark Ages should probably slide the disc into their consoles as soon as possible, as the game requires downloading dozens of gigabytes. Although the Nintendo Switch 2's game-key cards have faced sharp criticism for requiring full game downloads, an online database shows that the practice has also affected major recent releases on other platforms.

According to DoesItPlay.org, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X discs for Doom: The Dark Ages contain virtually no game data. Like the upcoming Nintendo Switch 2's game-key cards, inserting these discs merely initiates a download of the full digital version.

The PS5 disc includes approximately 85MB of data, while the Xbox Series X disc contains about 300MB. Although the exact Xbox download size remains unknown, the PS5 version requires an 84GB download. A press screenshot of the PC version indicates that the Steam download is around 64GB. Once installed, an internet connection is no longer required to play.

One of our lovely Patreon Supporters got their hands on a copy of DOOM: The Dark Ages PS5 early.

Just a 85 MB stub and a blocker to go online and update.

(deleted the previous tweet about this due to hope getting in the way of our basic reading ability ;-)) pic.twitter.com/nMq5VwsR8Y

– Does it play? (@DoesItPlay1) May 9, 2025

Nintendo raised concerns that nearly-empty physical copies of console games might become standard after revealing the Switch 2's game-key cards. However, requiring full digital downloads for physical editions has been somewhat common for years.

DoesItPlay examines what happens when new-release game discs are inserted into consoles while offline, revealing that physical copies of numerous titles contain little to no content.

Bethesda appears to have standardized this approach, as both Starfield and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle ship on discs with only partial data. Similarly, NBA 2K25, Hogwarts Legacy, and Alan Wake II only enable early gameplay segments before requiring downloads.

Beyond the inconvenience of delayed playtime, this trend raises serious concerns about game preservation.

The Call of Duty series presents a particularly extreme example. Activision faced backlash for releasing Modern Warfare II with just 70MB on the disc and a required 150GB download. Shockingly, the following two titles, Modern Warfare III and Black Ops 6, contain the same data from Modern Warfare II. From there, users can download gameplay modes independently.

Beyond the inconvenience of delayed playtime, this trend raises serious concerns about game preservation. These discs function more as physical licenses that can be traded or sold, signaling a shift toward an all-digital future. While this is already the case on PC, the presence of multiple digital storefronts offers users more flexibility. For example, Doom (2016) recently launched DRM-free on GOG.

Doom: The Dark Ages has received generally favorable reviews, praised for its expansive levels, impressive visuals, and enjoyable combat. However, the requirement for ray tracing makes it difficult to run on lower-end PCs.

Customers who purchase an Nvidia RTX 5070, 5070 Ti, 5080, or 5090 will receive a free copy of the game. Doom: The Dark Ages will unlock on Game Pass, Battle.net, and Steam on May 15 at midnight New Zealand time (8 PM ET on May 14). The premium edition offers two days of early access. Additionally, the Xbox, Windows Store, and Battle.net versions support cross-buy functionality.

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Doom: The Dark Ages discs contain almost no data, require full game downloads

 

[Kirby1]

Who cares. This is not an issue. No one is playing games like this without the ability to download a game.

 

[Megalomaniac]

Who cares. This is not an issue. No one is playing games like this without the ability to download a game.

I'd say people with diminished storage space care.

100GB will ultimately be more than 10% of the 1TB storage.

Thing is, since they've been starving for games and GTA6 won't be out till a year from now, I'd imagine they won't mind deleting some games.

 

[Megalomaniac]

I sure hope your consoles have over 1TB of storage available.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Who cares. This is not an issue. No one is playing games like this without the ability to download a game.

Right, everyone has fiber Internet at their home, there's nobody out there with slow Internet or data caps. SMH.

 

[Kirby1]

I'd say people with diminished storage space care.

100GB will ultimately be more than 10% of the 1TB storage.

Thing is, since they've been starving for games and GTA6 won't be out till a year from now, I'd imagine they won't mind deleting some games.

That's stupid. Games don't stream data from discs anymore. Even if the data were on the disc, it would still install everything to the storage drive.

 

[Kirby1]

Right, everyone has fiber Internet at their home, there's nobody out there with slow Internet or data caps. SMH.

If this is a problem for you, you're not playing many games because this is the case for so many games already. Doom is not special.

 

[NumberNine]

Right, everyone has fiber Internet at their home, there's nobody out there with slow Internet or data caps. SMH.

When the food is fast and the networks are slow, everybody's lookin for fiber.

 

[RudyBob]

I don't like it. I'd rather have the ability to load it from disc and play OR get a download that I store and can then reinstall. I don't care about the companies. They care about us to the extent we give them money

 

[TooQik]

Seriously, how hard is it to release the game on a single Quadruple Layer Blu-ray disc which supports 128 GB, no internet downloads necessary. The companies are already paying the cost of putting it on physical media anyway.

 

[hahahanoobs]

Seriously, how hard is it to release the game on a single Quadruple Layer Blu-ray disc which supports 128 GB, no internet downloads necessary. The companies are already paying the cost of putting it on physical media anyway.

Hard, since XSX and PS5 Blu-ray players are hardware limited to 100GB.
Your second sentence doesn't make sense from a business perspective. Companies rarely offer more at the same price.

 

[hahahanoobs]

Who cares. This is not an issue. No one is playing games like this without the ability to download a game.

Storage.

 

[Kirby1]

Storage.

I'm sorry you never learned how to form sentences.

 

[The Talking Tech]

Who cares. This is not an issue. No one is playing games like this without the ability to download a game.

Who cares???
Seat there and wait for the entire 100GB download that should have been on the Disc to begin is Microsoft's way to force you to get accustomed to a world with just Gamepass, a world with just Digital Only gaming in which it benefits them by rewiring your brain away from from gaming preservation and physical gaming ownership.

Some people are really corporate apologists and complicit of their terrible business decisions as we can clearly see on here.

 

[The Talking Tech]

Sadly this is Microsoft's way to get you accustomed to a world with just Gamepass, a world with just Digital Only gaming in which it benefits them by rewiring your brain away from from gaming preservation and physical gaming ownership.

And even more sad that plenty of people on here are complicit of such actions by thinking these kind of corporate greed is "fine" and that "we should get used to it" lacking the understanding that we are the consumer and we have the power to have these companies reverse their decisions.

 

[Kirby1]

Sadly this is Microsoft's way to get you accustomed to a world with just Gamepass, a world with just Digital Only gaming in which it benefits them by rewiring your brain away from from gaming preservation and physical gaming ownership.

And even more sad that plenty of people on here are complicit of such actions by thinking these kind of corporate greed is "fine" and that "we should get used to it" lacking the understanding that we are the consumer and we have the power to have these companies reverse their decisions.

You are on the internet right now. You can download the game.

All this pissing and moaning over literally nothing. Tons of games have come out like this in the past already. This is a common practice. Techspot is just rage baiting you.

Boarderlands 2 is an older game and it's 200GBs.

 

[hahahanoobs]

I'm sorry you never learned how to form sentences.

Thank you.

 

[The Talking Tech]

You are on the internet right now. You can download the game.

All this pissing and moaning over literally nothing. Tons of games have come out like this in the past already. This is a common practice. Techspot is just rage baiting you.

Boarderlands 2 is an older game and it's 200GBs.

As I said .....

And even more sad that plenty of people on here are complicit of such actions by thinking these kind of corporate greed is "fine" and that "we should get used to it"

A defeated attitude leads to complicity.

 

[Kirby1]

As I said .....

And even more sad that plenty of people on here are complicit of such actions by thinking these kind of corporate greed is "fine" and that "we should get used to it"

A defeated attitude leads to complicity.

Defeated how? Because a game that would definitely install to the hard drive on a consoles will do so by downloading the game vs installing it from the disc?

This is already extremely common. Lots of games don't even fit on a disc.

I am a PC gamer. Most of the games I play are huge and I don't even have a disc drive in my PC, as is the case for the vast majority of PCs these days.

Consoles are well behind the times. But you have fun keeping track of your discs and thinking that somehow makes your life as a gamer better.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

You are on the internet right now. You can download the game.

All this pissing and moaning over literally nothing. Tons of games have come out like this in the past already. This is a common practice. Techspot is just rage baiting you.

Because as we all know, being able to post text on the internet is the same as being able to download a 100GB game in mere minutes..

SMH man. Not everyone has gig fiber.

Boarderlands 2 is an older game and it's 200GBs.

This is pure ignorant cap. Borderlands 2 uses 16.5 GB of storage space and is a 13.5 GB download with all the DLC. Anyone who owns the game knows it isnt 200GB.....

Hard, since XSX and PS5 Blu-ray players are hardware limited to 100GB.
Your second sentence doesn't make sense from a business perspective. Companies rarely offer more at the same price.

So make it 2 disks. One is an install disk, the other the play disk. We did that decades ago without issue.

Of course, the install size of this game is not over 100GB , so a single disk would suffice.

Defeated how? Because a game that would definitely install to the hard drive on a consoles will do so by downloading the game vs installing it from the disc?

This is already extremely common. Lots of games don't even fit on a disc.

I am a PC gamer. Most of the games I play are huge and I don't even have a disc drive in my PC, as is the case for the vast majority of PCs these days.

Consoles are well behind the times. But you have fun keeping track of your discs and thinking that somehow makes your life as a gamer better.

Justifying bad actions because "its fine" doesnt make the actions suddenly turn good. They're still bad. If you're not going to include the game on disk, dont even make a physical release, you are simply polluting the world with plastic garbage. There is no technical reason the full game couldnt be on disk, if you're going to make them, put the full game on them. Takes just as much effort.

That avoids the main point: this is reinforcing the "every game must be downloaded" philosophy, which just so happens to remove all control the consumer has over their media. This is a BAD thing, unless you're a corpo bootlicker that just cant get enough of that leather taste.

 

[Kirby1]

Because as we all know, being able to post text on the internet is the same as being able to download a 100GB game in mere minutes..

SMH man. Not everyone has gig fiber.

This is pure ignorant cap. Borderlands 2 uses 16.5 GB of storage space and is a 13.5 GB download with all the DLC. Anyone who owns the game knows it isnt 200GB.....

So make it 2 disks. One is an install disk, the other the play disk. We did that decades ago without issue.

Of course, the install size of this game is not over 100GB , so a single disk would suffice.

Justifying bad actions because "its fine" doesnt make the actions suddenly turn good. They're still bad. If you're not going to include the game on disk, dont even make a physical release, you are simply polluting the world with plastic garbage. There is no technical reason the full game couldnt be on disk, if you're going to make them, put the full game on them. Takes just as much effort.

That avoids the main point: this is reinforcing the "every game must be downloaded" philosophy, which just so happens to remove all control the consumer has over their media. This is a BAD thing, unless you're a corpo bootlicker that just cant get enough of that leather taste.

Even if your internet speed is only 50mbps, which is very slow by today's standards, the game would download in about 4.5 hours.

Not exactly worth throwing a fit.

You clearly have internet. You can download the game, even if it takes a while.

 

[TheBigFatClown]

Even if your internet speed is only 50mbps, which is very slow by today's standards, the game would download in about 4.5 hours.

Not exactly worth throwing a fit.

You clearly have internet. You can download the game, even if it takes a while.

Wait though, why would they sell the game on optical media if you couldn't play it right away? Maybe we should demand that our credit card not be charged for 4.5 hours or until my game download is finished. They can wait 4.5 hours to get paid since its okay for me to piss away 4.5 hours of my life downloading a game that could have been put on disc. Yes?

 

[Kirby1]

Wait though, why would they sell the game on optical media if you couldn't play it right away? Maybe we should demand that our credit card not be charged for 4.5 hours or until my game download is finished. They can wait 4.5 hours to get paid since its okay for me to piss away 4.5 hours of my life downloading a game that could have been put on disc. Yes?

One of the biggest reasons they do this is because they are polishing the game right up to release, so whatever data the printed to discs would be outdated and need to be patched immediately anyway.

On top of that, a full sized blu-ray disc costs about $3 to manufacture. While not a huge cost, if the game sell for $60 then $3 per copy is 5% of the sale price, on top of the 30% or more that a retailer would charge.

People get so mad about Nintendo selling gamer for $80 and then also get mad when devs don't want to spend 5% of their sales revenue on discs that won't be able to contain a playable version of the game without being patched anyway.

If there were a real market for big budget AAA games being on discs today, devs should make that a secondary priority and release physical copies maybe 6 months later when the game has been patched and they're no longer actively updating it, and the cost should be at least $3 higher vs digital. But there really isn't a market for this. SSDs are cheap enough that's it's easy to expand the storage on a console. 99% of the console gamers out there expecting to play big budget AAA games are not going to be strangers to large files sizes and downloads at this point. It's just not reality to argue that there are still more than a negligible few console gamers out there trying to get by on a PS5 or Xbox Series without an internet connection.

If you look at a list of the most popular games on PS5, roughly half don't even have a physical release at all.

 

[umeng2002]

My old Mario Bros. cartridge from the 80s sitting in my closet still works. No internet needed.

 

[Kirby1]

My old Mario Bros. cartridge from the 80s sitting in my closet still works. No internet needed.

Internet wasn't an option in the 80s, and that game is 40kB.

But I guarantee you if devs had a way to get around the relatively high cost of making cartridges back then, they definitely would have gone that route. Cartridges were a major hurdle for game devs back then.