Sub-Zero

Not surprisingly, major blockbuster video games are getting larger and larger, with some console games now around 100 GB in size. In addition, the hard drive on both the PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One X is one terabyte, which can fill up pretty quickly. Considering current games often require large downloads even when buying the game on a disc, as well as mandatory installs quickly filling up the console's hard drive, are you concerned about increasing game sizes and limited hard drive space for the next generation of video game consoles?

The Questyen

I've never once been concerned with console storage sizes. When I finish a game I delete it. If I want to replay it I redownload it. I'm willing to bet I own more digital games on consoles than 98% of the people on these forums and I've never even used half of my storage space.

Decker

Well I have a data cap and came within 85% of it last month. I am concerned since I can't freely download, delete and re-download games without going over my limit. I pay enough every month for my ISP as is

RichC2

No not really, who knows, maybe stronger systems will allow us to go back to using compressed assets.

Nvme and ssd storage has dropped drastically in price lately as well. Plus fiber here with no cap.

OldBoy

As Quest said, I just keep what I want readily available. I play, I finish, I delete. If I want to ever play again, I reinstall. My internal is like 1/4 full and 2 TB drive not even half full and most of what I have I won’t get to for years

mndtrp

My only concern is for the people who have ISP caps, or incredibly slow download speeds. Otherwise, with the ability to add external storage easily and cheaply, space isn't really an issue. Like others here, if I do run out of space, I'll just delete what I've already played, like I do on the PS3.

SunMonkey

Dan

milo bloom

I just wish it were easier. It's very clunky having a something like the Xbox One S, a premier model of the Xbox line, and we have to hook up an external hard drive with it's own power source to hold all the games.
They really need to make it easier to upgrade these things.

mhg83

They're gonna probably ship with 2 TB storage for next gen systems .

I'm not a fan of streaming games but if it gets to insane file sizes may have to eventually use streaming.
PS6 games will probably be close to 300 GB lol

Dan

davidh777

fujishig

For people with fast internet and no data caps, great. For a lot of the rest of the world (and it feels like companies are getting more restrictive on data caps not less), not so great.

But as long as HDD/memory card technology continues to improve and gets cheaper, and the companies make it easy to add storage, it's probably ok for most people. If they ever go the Apple model of charging a premium for space AND making it proprietary (again), though...

It will make discs almost useless, though. We're already pretty much at a point where most major games require patches to play. You won't be able to break out your disk 25 years from now and play it if the update servers are all down, even for a completely offline game.

Rival11

The only thing I care about is the initial install for loading games. I'm constantly hearing that there will be no load times at all for games - hopefully it's true.

fujishig

No load times or no install times? I doubt either is true. If you want to lessen load times you need to install to the internal disk/memory card and you're at the mercy of how fast your internet, or the media read/write speeds are (and they usually cheap out on that, I doubt we'll get SSDs as default in the next gen). Even if you put everything in internal memory for quick access, that will take some amount of time and even with a ton of memory developers would start exceeding that anyway.

Rival11

No load times, saw numerous articles online about it - I bleieve IGN had one as well. I myself am not saying it's true (really hope it is of course).

Mike86

fujishig

The amount of time (and space) a PS4 game takes to patch is ridiculous, I think it's the way they structured it so there was no improving it this gen. Like seriously, if you have a minor update for a game it can take forever, even if you can download the patch on a really fast connection. Maybe that's where they're talking about gains, but if they're really saying there's no load times, the only thing I can think of is they're going to put everything on disc which means even more storage used up, unless there's been some magical technology advancement I'm unaware of.

milo bloom

Isn't the thing about huge patches being that it's not just a few lines of code that are being added or replaced, but because of how programming works, the patch is actually replacing a huge chunk of the programming surrounding the offending part? So what may seem like a huge patch isn't really increasing the size of the file by that whole amount, just a smaller percentage. Am I off base on that?

fujishig

I think the way it works, at least on PS4, is that when a game is patched it reinstalls the whole game again with the patched code. So yeah, at the end of the day the actual file size isn't that much bigger, but you need basically double the space to even install the patch regardless of how big it is, and the time to write all that data takes forever. That's why I said I hope they architect it differently this time.

Sub-Zero

Thanks for all of the replies.

Here is an article that discusses improvements in load times for the upcoming PlayStation 5:

Sony’s New PlayStation 5 SSD Won’t Just Reduce Load Time, It’ll End It

fujishig

Interesting. I wonder if this means it'll be a secondary drive and there will still be a primary drive to hold most of the data, or if we're stuck with some kind of cool but proprietary drive that we can't easily (or cheaply) upgrade ourselves. Wait, this is Sony.

RichC2

Yeah, I see that and all I read is "Upcharge". It's probably just an NVMe PCI-E x4 SSD (which generally run about 5 times faster than SATA III-based SSDs.) In the PC world, a high quality 2 TB NVMe SSD is already less than $200.

Hopefully they're taking lessons learned from their failed PSP instead of tips from Apple.

story

Well, I wasn't, but now I am!

fujishig

I haven't played RDR2 but I was curious about that comment in the article that it has no loading screens, especially since there's no fancy SSD in the current crop of PS4s. Instead, googling RDR2 loading screen shows a ton of people complaining about getting stuck on loading screens... so I'm confused.