Gadgetory

- Games are getting bigger and bigger. So big, in fact, that it's getting really difficult to maintain an entire library on one gaming console without having to constantly delete things. And with games getting larger, and with new gaming systems on the horizon, a very important question is to be asked. How big do their hard drives need to be? Or, maybe, just maybe, they won't even need them at all. (electronic music) Right now, the kind of go to storage size on Xbox One and PS4 is one terabyte. When they first came out, we were seeing smaller sizes like 500 gigs which wasn't useless at launch, but it's gotten certainly more difficult to work with as time has gone by. Because not only have more games been coming out, but games have been getting bigger and bigger. And with the release of 4K models of systems, if you own those, well 4K versions of games take up even more space. As an example, Red Dead Redemption II on a 4K console is 111 gigs. If you're working with a one terabyte system, that's over a tenth of it right there. Now obviously, not every single game out there is that large, and in fact, some of them are very, very small. But the fact of the matter is that this is a problem that's only going to literally get bigger and bigger. Now as far as current consoles are concerned, there are some ways to work with this. You can, of course, use an external hard drive or SSD. There's a lot of ones that are themed even for the systems. There's even specialized accessories like this one right here which actually attaches to the body of your Xbox and in this case, can get as high as 12 terabytes of storage which might be actually a little bit of overkill, but it's certainly useful. And, if you're willing to put in a little bit extra effort, you can even just exchange the internal hard drive itself, that way you're not adding anything to the outside of the system while still getting a little bit more room to work with. So let's break down how big exactly the average game is and how quickly that would fill up a hard drive. So again, game sizes vary a lot. They can get as large as over 100 gigs. Like with Red Dead Redemption II or Gears of War 4 when they're in 4K mode. There are other games, like indie titles, that take up almost no space at all. And then the kind of middle sweet spot, I think, for a lot of major AAA titles is somewhere between 30 and 60 gigs depending on the type of game. Whether it's open world or very linear. And how much DLC they get. So let's be even a little conservative and say the average game is about 50 gigs. If every single game you owned was 50 gigabytes in size and you had a one terabyte hard drive, that means you could fit about 20 games for every terabyte. Although, with that hard drive size, you're probably going to have a little less because some of that is going to be taken up by your system's OS. So 18, maybe 19 games. And to put in perspective how much larger games have grown over time, if you took the entire NES library of just over 700 games, for the licensed ones at least, that totals to about 230 megabytes of data. We're going to do a little bit of heavy rounding here, but the numbers are still going to get pretty ridiculous. So if you took that much data, and put it on a one terabyte hard drive, you could put that library in there 4,350 times. That totals to over three million games you could fit. And now we're down to 19. Now obviously the size difference in games right now to the next generation isn't going to be that significant of a boost, but as time goes on, games are just going to keep larger and larger. So one terabyte for 18 games, and not even that, once more and more of them are going to be 4K supported and probably hitting that 100 gigabyte mark is just not going to cut it. And it's interesting, really, to see how these changes in sizes have effected development of games over time because it's effected whether or not you even need a hard drive and how that works. For instance, old school systems just kept everything on the cards for games. That was it. Hard drives weren't a thing. Eventually we started getting memory cards, but that was really just to store any kind of save data you had. It had nothing to do with the game data itself. And once we started using hard drives, 20 gigs was enough at first. And then it blew up to needing 100, 150, 500. And now we're at the stage we're at with one terabyte and above. Now, while hard drives have gotten really important for this generation and the last generation of systems, there is the small possibility of all that changing with the next generation. To the point where we might not actually need hard drives the way we at least currently do. When talking about the next generation of consoles, there's some potential new technologies that make the entire debate about hard drive size really interesting. At least for Xbox. For Playstation, I think currently they're plan is to be fairly traditional. I think the next system is just going to be more power, more storage, very straight forward. Which, hey, if it works, why stop? But with Microsoft, I think there's a slightly different debate we can be having. I think that there are two different new Xboxs in the works. On the one hand, there's the very premium, very expensive one. Something along the lines of what we have with the Xbox One X right now. And something that can still play disks, it will be able to play games from the hard drive directly, and it's going to be something that's very powerful. But, on the more affordable end of the spectrum, is the concept of focusing on streamable games. We've talked before a bunch about the concept of whether Xbox wants to embrace a post-ownership version of gaming where there's things like Xbox game pass that gives you access to games. But there's the other idea of focusing on all your gaming experiences being streamed, rather than something that's being played on the system itself. And this is cool for a bunch of reasons. First off, it makes making the system itself way cheaper. Provided you have a good enough internet connection, you're going to be able to play really awesome games without having to worry about your system actually running hot or needing to buy something that's fancier than something else. It's just going to be a basic little streaming box. And to top that off, the only real storage issue you would have is save data. If all the games you're playing are from a remote location that's not where you are, well you don't have to worry about how big of the game in question is. Microsoft's already got that handled on the server. On your own system, you just have to worry about all the save data you do, and that's it. Which compared to how big games are, is nothing. Now is this something that's going to happen for sure? Maybe. I mean this is all based on just theory and things that Microsoft has been doing and I think it all points towards this kind of post-ownership future they want to do. And there's more tests going on right now. We're already seeing, in the near future, a supposed disk-less Xbox One. And if we're going to have something like that that focuses on digital only, it's not that far of a leap to move even further and get rid of the hard drive. Or at least have a significantly smaller one and focus on that streaming future of gaming.