I’ve had a technology addiction for as long as I can remember. Even if I had absolutely no use for it, I had to have the latest and greatest technology. I think this came from my grandmother, who was always concerned with keeping up with her church friends, but it could have also come from my love of video games. Either way, it means I’ve been a part of many fads and many dumb trends; VR, pocket gaming, portable pets, I even had those Tyco Notebook Games that fit into your Trapper Keeper and you played them with a penny. So, naturally I also have an Xbox Series X and PS5 in our current generation.
I’ve been collecting game systems for as long as they’ve been out. At last count, I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 systems and over 100,000 games. Yes, you read that correctly. It’s not been as hard or as expensive as you might think, having had friends that just simply gave me their systems and games as they aged out of them. Collecting games has gotten to the point where I just want to have some of them, knowing full well I may never play most of them. It’s having them there and ready to go that satisfies me. But it’s also having them there that has led to today’s problem and article.
Most people tend to keep a healthy number of games on their systems as they own them throughout their life cycle. You’re not always going to be playing every game on your PS5, but games are kept on there so fans don’t have to deal with the hours-long downloads that now seem to accompany every game being made. When you want to play a game, you don’t want to wait two hours for the thing to finish downloading, you wanna start it up and jump right in. This leads people to store games on their PS5 or Xbox Series that they may play often enough. In my case, it’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. But the problem with having two or three of these types of games is that you end up eating your entire harddrive’s free space by doing so.
This is where the title of this article comes in. As we shift toward a more digital future, one where companies force us to download more and more content, the lack of space on these systems is absolutely going to frustrate the hell out of gamers. Let’s just use me as an example. I have an additional SSD installed in my PS5, giving me about 2.5 terabytes of space available to me after you account for the OS and the room it uses to operate. Three games in the Call of Duty franchise will wipe out a good 50% of this available space and that’s with me having the ability to expand that available space.
Not everyone is going to have the ability to install a second SSD in their PS5 or Xbox Series X. Some people can barely afford the base system as it is, these things are nearly $700 after taxes and accessories. The idea of spitting out an additional $200 on storage space is just terrifying to some. Storage has always been the most expensive part of newer game consoles and now games are exponentially growing in size to add to the problem. Even if one doesn’t install three different Call of Duty games, you could reach this same problem by installing one Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto V, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Elden Ring. It’s not simply a Call of Duty issue.
As we get into a future where digital reigns supreme, we’re going to see things like physical media eventually phased out. We’re already seeing this in the fact that most physical games sold do not even have the base game on them. It’s just an install file and then the game downloads from the server when you put the disc in, so this problem is already here and on the horizon. This means space is going to become a premium asset for consumers as this trend continues and there are no signs of prices dropping anywhere in sight.
This basically means people are going to have to delete games as soon as they beat them, which honestly hurts developers as well since this means people might not be as inclined to replay a game if they have to reinstall it as well, I know I’ve passed on doing that for games already on my system. If I am doing it now, I know others are as well. Gamers shouldn’t have to nickel and dime the amount of space they have on their systems, Microsoft and Sony need to work with consumers to drastically reduce the pricing on these storage mediums to accommodate customers as this trend continues to grow.
Games are only getting bigger and systems only seem to be getting smaller in storage capacity. Something has to give or we’re going to reach a critical mass. One cannot be expected to house 250 gigabyte games when they’re given peanuts for storage out of the box. At least Sony learned from the PR disaster that was the egregiously overpriced proprietary storage for the PS Vita and have not introduced that concept again to the marketplace. Now we just need these companies to recognize that most humans are not keeping a spare storage server in their basement to accommodate games larger than movie files.