Despite players’ concerns over relatively small available storage space on PlayStation 5’s custom SSD, the CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment believes that the amount of space should be enough for most players. It is hard to believe in, though, as the initially the SSD turned out to reserve a substantial amount of space for system software.
The residual storage space comes down to 664GB, which is a shame considering just how much AAA games for PS5 are occupying. For instance, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War download size is roughly 135GB while Spider-Man: Miles Morales occupies a solid chunk worth 105GB. It doesn’t feel like players will be able to have more than five modern games installed at the same time, but at Sony, the situation is not being viewed as an issue.
In an interview with The Telegraph, SIE’s CEO Jim Ryan was asked if the available storage space on PS5 could be an issue for players, to which he responded with a confident denial. According to Ryan, the company is not receiving any critical feedback from PS5 owners that would indicate that players are experiencing complications. At the same time, Sony is monitoring existing consumer reviews, which seemingly don’t tend to highlight insufficient storage space as a problem, either. Additionally, the company has access to detailed data on PS4 regarding storage usage over the past years. Ryan told the Telegraph, "We obviously are able to monitor hard drive usage on the PS4 microscopically and everything that we saw there indicates that we should be fine." As it was discovered, the discussed issue is simply irrelevant for the previous-gen owners, which makes Sony believe that it should be fine with the recently introduced current gen. It is worth mentioning that with various PS5 games, players are able to manage their installations with surgical precision cutting off unused parts.
Still, not every PS5 title can be managed this freely, which ultimately leaves players with an issue of running out of space rapidly. Sony has already promised appropriate SSD expansions for the newest console, although they are not available at launch, and will probably cost a fortune once they finally release. What’s even more worrying is the fact that these expansions can’t be used to store PS5 games, which are designed strictly for the custom SSD. It leaves purchasable hardware storage add-ons for use with PS4 titles only, which doesn't get to the heart of the PS5's storage issues.
Although officially, Sony might indeed be confident in what it has to offer PlayStation 5 owners, it feels like the company is living in a separate world where reports on the console’s tiny storage space are simply non-existent. While storage expansions are not available at launch, it’s not even a big deal considering that PS5 games cannot be stored on them. Considering that, what’s even the point of purchasing them? The whole situation greatly favors Xbox Series X/S, where none of the aforementioned issues exist while Sony could potentially face a wave of criticism for ignoring obvious problems.
Source: The Telegraph