Why is everyone so upset about hot swapping for next-gen?

Ok, this is starting to bubble up more in a lot of comment sections. First it was the complaining about the Series S’s limited space, and Microsoft’s proprietary expansion. Then the complaints about the PS5 not having an expansion option at launch. I mean, I get it. In a perfect world I’d love to have 10 TB of super fast SSD storage on hand. But is this really a major issue? Both Sony and Microsoft allow for hot swapping data from a standard external HDD, which is a relatively cheap fix for this situation. Is it perfect? No, but are we really at the point that waiting 10-20 minutes to hot swap a game every now and then is a deal breaker? Especially when you can still keep your most frequently played games on the SSD (which is true for the Series S as well). I dunno, this feels like the most asinine criticism of the next gen right now. Am I missing something here?

It's a new console, we shouldn't be having to do this shit in 2020.

@sombre: But you don’t have to in that case, at least on the Xbox side. Just pay the extra and get the expansion drive and you’re good to go. Commodity prices still exist and that doesn’t change because it’s a new gen. If you’re building a PC to next gen spec, the super fast SDD is going to cost about the same, so the complaint doesn’t feel rooted in logic.

We should absolutely have to be doing this in 2020, unless you just don't want faster load times.

SSDs are not affordable still. A very mid grade ssd on pc will run you about $200 for 2tb.

Mosy people still have small SSDs and only install certain games on them.

Now, this is where I might draw a complaint. On pc, you can play games off either drive without issue. But for some reason(for Xbox at least not sure how ps5 works) you can't play current Gen games off the external drive and do have to hot swap them.

Is it a deal breaker? Heck no, is it annoying, sure.

If anything this will keep me from hanging onto games I'll never play again. Also keep in mind as people figure it out the selective install thing will become more prevalent.

"Last gen" consoles had 1TB of storage, so you would think "next gen" consoles would at least give you 1.5TB. It's shitty but I guess they needed to cut costs somewhere seeing as the rest of the hardware is so advanced. I don't think it's the end of the world as some would make it out to be. Would be really curious to see some hard statistics on how many people actively juggle more than 3 games at a time.

@swthompson: Genuine question, what’s the decision that wouldn’t result in a regression that also doesn’t make consoles too expensive for the mass market?

People have slow Internet and data caps, and each of the consoles has versions with no disc drive. But even disc games need huge patches now. So it's basically impossible to keep "evergreen" games installed if they're big.

Let's say you like to play Mortal Kombat with your brother every few weeks. Or you just like to pop into Call of Duty every now and then. Or there's some open world game you like to cruise around in. Now you have to go through a lengthy install process (either over the net or off an external drive) every time you want to play one of those games if you've got a few other things installed.

It's frustrating.

Is it an avoidable problem? Maybe not. But I get why people are irritated.

I have hundreds of games installed on both my consoles right now thanks to being able to install new drives in the PS4 and use externals with the Xbox One (you can with PS4 too.) I like having access to a massive library at one time. That's about to go away. Am I pissed about it? No. Am I disappointed? Yes.

@swthompson: This is a video game forum. Literally any discussion here is a waste of time. I’m not trying to “sneer”, I was curious and I guess I now have an answer. Thanks, I guess.

The reason has been explained and covered quite extensively. Games designed exclusively for the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S can require high bandwidth asset streaming to work as intended. Running them off a spinny drive or even an SSD that doesn't meet throughput requirements will break those games.

I can understand why it would be frustrating but I can't relate. I've got one or two games I keep installed all year long and the rest get deleted as soon as I finish them. In six years with the standard PS4's standard hard drive I've run into a storage issue maybe twice per year and it's never been terribly agonizing deciding which game gets the axe in favor of the game I'm trying to download.

I wish the new consoles were more convenient for people in different situations but I think it's totally understandable why they aren't considering how much custom-made technology appears to be under the hood.

I think this will be what trips a lot of people up - 1TB of HDD storage last gen is a much lower-cost drive than 1TB of the new high-end SSDs that are being used. The average consumer won't really consider that issue, but it's the reality of next-gen (which is specifically leaning on the high-speed SSDs as a big part of their selling point).

If new games run just fine on the old hard drives, it means the games aren't taking advantage of the potential of running off an SSD (which is much bigger than simply how long load screens are). It would be interesting to see a world where games could opt-in to requiring the SSD install on a case-by-case basis, but that would likely just cause more confusion to the end user.

While this isn't an immediate issue for me, I can see it being one for players who like to play a lot of live service or multiplayer focused games. It's going to be rough for Series S owners who want to take advantage of Game Pass but be stuck with just 350-ish GB of available space. That's not a lot of room when Destiny and COD take up half or more.

@y2ken: But at the same time, we already saw this trend on PC a decade or so ago

SSDs are expensive/Fast SSDs are expensive. So you have that for your most used stuff and some old spinning disks for the rest.

Optimally we would have basically what all of us on the PC side will for storage: super fast m2 drive and then a few "normal" SSDs. But even just having the fast SSD and a 2 or 3 TB HDD built in to the console that we can migrate from would go a long way toward feeling "premium" even if folk will just get additional external USB3s anyway

I get that it costs money and getting these at these price points was a thing. But it definitely contributes toward feeling "cheap" even if that isn't the most reasonable reaction

@y2ken: To be fair, developers can simply design their games to Xbox One or PS4 spec and get around the SSD requirement. I suspect that’s the route a lot of indie devs will take. There’s no reason the next Hollow Knight game, for instance, has to require an SSD, so why not just call it a last gen game and move on?

This swapping is a serious problem for people with low download speeds or data caps. If you've got a terabyte data cap or something, then you can't download more than a few AAA games a month. Even if you buy on disc these days, you could wind up downloading 50-100 GBs worth of patches and updated content, and that's only going to get much worse if 4K textures actually become the norm. Most of these people get their games patched all the way up and then just leave them on the drive, or would strongly prefer to do so. Sure, you can back your games up on external storage, but having to pay for extra drives and keep them around kinda sucks and defeats the "ease-of-use" purpose of a console. That moves consoles a step closer towards "just being a PC", which doesn't seem to be what console gamers want.

Also keep in mind that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2019 has a 231GB install footprint on PCs. That's a quarter of your PS4 storage, a fifth of your series X storage, and over half of the available storage for a Series S. For ONE GAME. If your primary games are Destiny 2, MW2019, and Halo 5 and you get a Series S, you're going to have to drop one of those and the paltry amount of space left will be enough for an indie game or two. I'd personally consider that completely unacceptable.

This trend has been getting worse over the past few years. MW2019's extreme seems like it might be the norm by the halfway point of this generation. Even at this point in time, a terabyte simply isn't enough space.

While I understand the concept of "SSDs are expensive", if I'm spending $500 on a machine that exists to play video games, I expect it to cover those needs adequately without further purchases (except, of course, the games themselves). A single terabyte drive does not, in my personal opinion, cover those needs.

Disclaimer: I'm generally a PC Gamer. I honestly spent a bit of time thinking about getting a Series X for those games I still play with a controller in the living room, instead of running an HDMI cable through the house, but the storage situation really hampers that (among other things).

Let's hope the amount of de-duplication an SSD offers + use of better compression techniques means that file sizes will shrink or at least stay stable from here on out. COD's size is pretty much the nr 1 negative thing i hear about that game nowadays.

Its a valid complaint but it is a specific circumstance one that a lot of people don't worry about at all so it just runs hot and cold that way. But yeah some people internet wise have a hard time, especially with download speeds. I have been in that boat, where downloading a 40 GB game or whatever is a basically whole day proposition, and that makes the concern simply a bigger deal. Now for me in my current internet speed situation, its nothing to redownload games, especially on Steam and from Microsft where I get very good speeds, so I have seen both sides of it.

Anyways, I do think a big part should be on developers though insofar as last gen things balooned wildly. Its up to them to reign it in. If the HD space is small and CoD balloons again thats a problem.

Honestly, as someone who gets plenty of games, the space has never bothered me. I may have 3-4 games on this hard drive I want to go back to but, once I'm finished with a game, it tends to stay banished to the Library.

Downloading is my biggest obstacle but that's something the console makers don't necessarily have to tackle.

I think it's just a thing because of a couple reasons.

4k is causing games to explode in size. COD might be the poster child, but traditionally, game developers havent had much reason to care about file sizes for the past generation, usually their restriction is what they can compress onto a blu-ray disc more than how much HDD space it consumes for the end user. Gears of War 4's notable 120GB is suddenly average at best. Where you had 5-10 full games on a last gen console's default storage - now you have 2-4.

Cost. New consoles aren't just expecting SSD but higher end SSD technologies that are often ignored by most PC builders because the real world difference between PCIE 3.0 and 4.0 is a second of loading - but the money difference is probably a hundred bucks a TB. So using a higher standard is where you get the sticker shock on the Xbox SSD expansions being $200 while you can find 1TB nvme drives for half that on PC.

It sounds like the problem will sort itself out as external SSD's become cheaper.

@corvak: Don't forget that games don't need to have multiple copies of the same files anymore to increase loading times, so that will save on game size surely?

PC guy talking, but the main reason for why I bought an 8TB hard drive for my games is that whatever I'd want to play at any given moment is instantly at my beck and call.

Less thinking. Less waiting. More playing.

It’s inconvenient but it’s understandable. I don’t think it’s a step backwards because of the massive gains in technology. Yeah if we were getting the same hard drives with the same storage space, but we’re not.

it’s an issue at launch and I imagine prices will drop eventually.

The simple answer is people like to complain about things. If the consoles were 4tb and $1000 you would see complaints. They bitch about the lack of games at launch and are forgetting the PS4 had only 3 exclusive games, Killzone, Knack and Resogun so that's 1 more than what the PS5 has with Astro's playroom and Demons Souls. Sure I would of liked Spiderman, Bugsnax and Sackboy to be PS5 only but there not deal with it or don't buy a new system.

There's no way to move PS5 games off the SSD

@potatispress: That, I think we can all agree, is some bullshit.

Because it's 2020, games are 100's of gb and only getting bigger, and these consoles have low space with no disk drives. I have no idea what they were thinking with these digital skews. They could have atleast had hybrid drives with an extra gig of space , or allow for games to run on HDD's as well with a sacrifice in load times (honestly just get a 10,000rpm and it's not that bad anyway)

I'm okay with this. Load times have never bothered me and the best thing I ever did with my PS4 was buy a 4TB external hard drive to never worry about storage space again.

But it's not just "load" times - if it was just traditional start of game / start of level load times they'd probably allow it.

But these fast drives are also going to be used for streaming assets - i.e. loading geometry, textures, sounds etc on the fly as you run around a level or an open world. It's how these machines are planning to get around the relative lack of additional memory over the previous generation - they can't really have more data in memory at the start of a level, but they can load it super quickly on the fly as it's needed.

A slow drive would just completely break games that used those techniques (which is probably going to end up being a lot of games as devs strive to get the most out of the new machines).

Edit - the PS5 not allowing external storage of PS5 games is utter crap though :-(

I've definitely found that as Gamepass's catalog has grown that it's drastically increased the frequency that I'm downloading and shuffling games between SSDs and HDDs. While the SSD bandwidth represents a huge boost to overall user experience this generation of consoles, I feel like once subscription services become the home of most new releases there's going to be a dramatic shift in the manner that people try and play games week to week (probably much closer to how things were with game rentals.)

It's impossible to imagine these consoles being able to function properly in that market without the ability to shuffle games to/from higher capacity external drives. It would pretty much force people with slower connections and/or data caps to create proxy caches for PSN content.

@eccentrix: Honestly, sticking with current gen consoles is perfectly valid if storage size is a dealbreaker. The PS4 and X1 are going to continue being viable consoles for at least the next 1-2 years. By then, I expect storage costs will have sufficiently come down that this debate becomes moot.

@djredbat: To me it is an issue because, assuming you truly need an extra hard drive, the manufacturer is selling you a product at a price that sounds reasonable knowing that you will most likely have to spend more money in the future to

complete the experience. It is disingenuous for any added cost no matter how small (like memory sticks for the Switch for example), it just adds to the total cost of a product that should feel complete from the get go. As per your example, they are actually selling you the $1000 console at the moment so complaining seems

reasonable to me.

@bitbat: That seems a bit extreme. I'm getting a Series X day one and have zero desire to buy an expansion card. Why should I need to pay extra because someone else has a warped view of what a "complete" experience should look like?

I also have plenty of friends who are fine with the Switch's onboard memory because them mainly buy physical. I hardly think they need to bear a cost just because I want to expand out my storage.

Like most others have said its a step forward in one direction, a step back in the other. The amount of space these consoles have can be taken up by two or three games from this generation, and when you think about going from 1080p to 4K I don't think the amount of space on these new consoles is going to feel very roomy for long. And with PS5 not supporting transferring to an external drive is hopefully a thing that is getting overlooked to make it out for launch, because that's going to be a problem even at launch. I'm just sitting back for now waiting for more games, but also for drives to hopefully come down to a more reasonable price for a comfortable size for my needs.

Nobody likes going into a new generation dropping half a grand on hardware and already having to face compromises and workarounds, isn't that relatable?

I've been swapping games between my internal (and slooooow) Xbox One hard drive and my small, external SSD for a couple years now. I really haven't found it to be much of a hassle. At least on the Xbox side the process of copying/moving games between drives is relatively quick and painless.

@navster15: Ironically, you just used one of the more notorious examples of pushing the "savings" on to consumers

The "switch tax" is referenced pretty regularly and, while more complex, is totally a thing. Indie games tend to cost more on the switch, in part, because of the cost of those cartridges. And a lot of that boils down to wanting to favor physical at the expense of more expensive digital which, in part, is because of that small on board storage.

Also: This is a moot point because any physical purchase on PS4/XBONE (let alone PS5/XSE*) installs directly to the internal drive anyway.

the time it takes to hot swap will be made up from decreased load times,.

At least you can do the swap.

In the Windows Store, where many very large games now live, you can't move games between drives. You have to set the install directory for all Apps in the same place and can't ever move them.

This came to mind when I was pondering about downloading the new Destiny2 on Gamepass, a huge game that i'd have to delete and redownload if I needed the space.

Edit: Found out this untrue.... they added a Move button in yet another subscreen. For people reading this, it's under Apps and Features. You have to install to default and can then move a game.

Space constraints lead me to actually finish games. With infinite storage I might have a bunch of RPG's still sitting on my hard drive.

My solution for now is to keep my older systems hooked up and use the new ones for new games only. If it's a small indie game or something, I'll just put it on my One X over the Series X and have a similar experience. In a couple years when space might become an issue, I'll invest in more storage. This has been the way of things for several generations now.

This is part of being an early adopter. If you want the new toy day one, it's going to cost you more to do more of the thing you want or you deal with what you have in the box. You can always wait 6 months or a year and wait for the dust to settle around the launch of these consoles.

It’s an ok compromise, if it means tje cost can be this low (and it really is, for the machines we are getting), that means more people can afford them. That alone is great, and selfishly it means faster adoption, more sales etc., which benefits everyone.

Eh I'm good to wait 2 - 3 years for price drops and better versions to be released. I dont need either console before then