Before the consoles were actually announced, my friends and I tried to guess what some of the specs were going to be. Most importantly were "what kind of media will the games come on?" and "how much storage space will be available on the console itself?".
We all guessed that the games would be on Blu Ray, and they are. But for internal HDD, we were guessing 1TB, 2TB, or even 5TB. Nope. 500GB! That isn't going to get the job done at all!
My guess is that both Sony and Microsoft got some great deals on surplus 500GB drives, so they decided to go with that. The problem is, a Blu Ray can hold nearly 1/10 that amount of information. So what is the point here?
Most games will require a mandatory install. Call of Duty Ghosts is rumored to weigh in at 40GB installed. That is 8% of the internal storage. Battlefield 4 install is said to be double what CoD is at a whopping 80GB, or 16% of your drive! That is nearly 1/5 of the entire drive for one game! And that is just the mandatory, that doesn't count extra BF Premium content! By the time you have all the maps, skins, weapons, vehicles, etc. that ship with Premium, we could be talking about 200GB!
Just to put this in perspective, a 360 game installed was at most about 4.6GB (most of the time), for a mere 1.89% of the 250GB drive (based on the 250GB model). To keep this standard, the XBOX ONE console would have to have around a 2.75TB hard drive. But it doesn't.
To make matters worse, both console are offering "Day One Digital", or the means to buy a game from the console's online store the very day it comes out. Here is where things could potentially get sticky; lets say that you bought Battlefield 4 on the console day one. Gotta have 80GB for that download. Then you have to install it, now the original file with the install is 120GB. Now start piling all the premium content on top of that. Wow.
How does either platform push digital with next to no storage on the device at all? Well, all is not lost as there are some options but some of them will cost you some $$. Microsoft has their "Cloud Storage" system (said to be free), but it is unknown at this time if there is a max limit on how much you can store there. The PS4 HDD is removable/replaceable. So you can just pop a larger drive in there and you're solid. USB 3.0 flash memory is rumored to be a storage solution, though the maximum size you can use is unknown at this time. On the XBOX ONE, you cannot remove/replace the HDD, but you can add an external USB3.0 HDD. This feature should be enabled sometime after launch. It will be likely that each company will ship their own branded USB 3.0 flash drive, PS4 should have a HDD available, and it would be no surprise to see an XBOX ONE branded external HDD for sale.
It's kind of annoying that the internal storage directly contradicts the idea of gaming moving towards digital. Take away the games heading towards digital though and you are still left with 2 next gen consoles that don't have enough storage to meet the needs of even the most casual gamer.
Let us know what you think about the storage limitations of the XBOX ONE and PS4 in the comments section below. Stay tuned to Big Ups Gaming for more gaming news. Thanks for reading!
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