Gaming

Nah, you can find people complaining about games being too big in cycles going all the way back to the beginning of retail PC gaming. I remember Screen Savers built their "Ultimate Gaming PC" in like 1998 with a few gigabytes of storage, and they said something like, "I know that seems like a lot, but games these days can be hundreds of megabytes, so we want to be able to just fit them all". Baldur's Gate 3 and Starfield are both large games. Not every game is that big, nor are these games necessarily doing something wrong by being that big.

SSD prices finally started dropping rapidly, and HDDs are even cheaper, for games like Sea of Stars or 30XX that don't need read speed performance, both of which have options to extend laptop storage space like the author's use case.

The sentiment isn't wrong. Space is cheap now. Had Star field come out when SSDs were having GPU-like pricing I'd be more outraged, but prices are falling and having multi-terabyte systems shouldn't be an issue. Way cheaper than GPUs that can play the game, that's for sure.

Read speeds from a USB stick are incomparably slower than most hard drives. The USB 3.0 specification has a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 5Gb/sec (~600MB/s). By comparison, my PCIe 4.0 NVMe (I believe most laptops these days come with NVMe storage? Could be wrong) has a read performance, reported by CrystalDiskMark, of 7.3GB/s (that's a big B, not a little b, and looking at 1MiB sequential 1 thread 8 queues). In other words, my hard drive's measured performance is 12x faster than the theoretical maximum throughput of a USB drive. This also doesn't take into account things like DirectStorage, which some games have started to adopt.

I think realistically games should consider separating the higher quality assets from the low quality assets intended for lower performance systems, and make them separate downloads. HD assets could be a free "DLC" on Steam, for example.

No it's not, unless they have a MacBook. And even in that case it's not hard to find an external SSD with a thunderbolt or USB3.2 interface.

I'd be inclined to agree but I'm frankly somewhat at a loss from this articles perspective. Why a 256gb boot drive in 2023? I'm only assuming, based on the math. If it were 512GB I'd assume they'd be able to shuffle off more data. If it's important files you need to access, store them on an external HDD? If they're a gamer and they know space is an issue, a SSD enclosure is not much more added cost to a 1TB drive and it solves the issue...

Like I said, I understand the intent about game sizes. But people playing BG3 or Starfield on their laptop are going to have other issues on top of storage, since most laptops have a pretty linear upgrade path. If you have the 256gb model the rest of the hardware probably reflects that pricepoint. Like @[email protected] said, at a certain point the idea of a game coming preloaded on a USB drive makes sense, but until then the ease for general use of an SSD enclosure makes more sense.

More and more developers seem to assume everyone else can afford what they consider to be cheap, and feel entitled to gobble up all the resources on other people’s systems as if they aren’t needed for anything else.

It's adding insult to injury when most of these games are now also launching at $70-80 these days, too.

My cousin just bought a 2tb nvme for $60, $10 more than a 2tb hdd cost 2 years ago.

Eh, With games like these a 1TB M2 SSD is kinda required to have, I have one and I'm wanting to have two already tbh.

Yup. And with regional pricing, the discrepancy between a game's price and hardware price is even greater.

For example, BG3 is around 15 dollars in Argentina, but a 2TB SSD is around 130 dollars.

Counterpoint: If not having room for a $70 game because there's a $60 game already on there (which also isn't normally a problem for him because his main gaming system is his $500 gaming console) is an issue, then the article is already being written from a position of privilege.

This resonates so much with me. I was hoping to upgrade my GPU this summer, and... yeah, that hasn't happened. But new release games are almost always a mess for the price paid, and there's an awful lot of indie games that run perfectly on my computer as it is right now. I don't think people like us are the target demographic of AAA studios.

Not in Australia, I can assure. Unless they are buying them second hand on Facebook marketplace

When was the last time you shopped for an SSD? Cheapest 1TB NVMe are around $35.