PS5, Xbox dilemma

Digital-only or optical-drive variants?

The latest Playstation 5 and Xbox Series S have started preselling with variants that have optical drives and cheaper digital, upload-only versions. The problem with digital-only systems is that they are limited by their storage capacity — meaning you can only have as many games as your hard disk drive (HDD) or solid-state drive (SSD) can accommodate.

And games today are data-intensive, thus the Xbox Series S, the cheapest at $299 in the next-generation gaming platforms, may only carry five to 10 games in its faster 512GB SSD. That’s actually being optimistic.

If there’s a silver lining, a lead developer of PS4, Mark Cerny, told the tech website that games could get smaller in sizes with the use of the faster SSD versus HDD.

Even the 1TB version of the PS5 and the Xbox will only hold twice as much and here we are assuming that the SSD or HDD storage capacities are not clipped by operating system data.

An example cited by Engadget was the digital version

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare which presently takes up a whopping 185GB on a PS4 or Xbox One.

“The much-anticipated Cyberpunk 2077, meanwhile, is expected to be an 80GB download. That’s already more than 250GB,” Engadget said.

“There will be smaller games, of course, and some titles, like Rare’s Sea of Thieves, have been cleverly shrunk post-release,” it added.

If there’s a silver lining, a lead developer of PS4, Mark Cerny, told the tech website that games could get smaller in sizes with the use of the faster SSD versus HDD.

He said that commonly-requested game elements like cars zipping by may no longer need to be duplicated on SSD because it runs faster than HDD thus it can retrieve data faster.

“In theory, this means the same game could have a smaller file size on the next set of consoles. Microsoft, meanwhile, has confirmed that some game installs will be slightly smaller on the Xbox Series S compared to the Series X. That’s because the former won’t need to download 4K assets from the Xbox Store,” Cerny told Engadget.

Engadget said Microsoft and Sony have seen this storage problem, thus they have come up with expandable storage at added cost to buyers of course, thereby begging the question why not buy the versions with Blu Ray-based optical drives?

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF MICROSOFT AT $299, the Xbox Series S digital edition may frustrate in the long run with the limited number of uploadable games.

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF SONY PLAYSTATION 5 with an optical drive may be the choice of gamers with the many titles available for the platform.