Short. While powerful graphics cards are becoming an increasingly important component for PC gamers, the big releases we’ve seen this year suggest that a high-capacity SSD is the wiser purchase. It’s starting to look like 100GB titles have become the norm, and that might be a problem for some people.
As PC Gamer points out, Star Wars Jedi. The recently released Survivor marks another game that many buyers will spend hours downloading. Its 130GB file size makes it the biggest PC title released this year. This is a trend that has become not only annoying for those with slower internet connections, but a pain for those with limited storage space.
The most recent Steam survey shows that just under half of participants have more than 1TB of space, followed by 23.18% between 250GB and 499GB, and 14.62% between 750GB and over. up to 999 GB. Those in that second category will find themselves erasing much of their drive’s contents to play some of this year’s biggest releases. Except Jedi. From Survivor, there’s Forspoken (120GB), Redfall (100GB), The Last of Us Part 1 (100GB), and Atomic Heart (90GB). It is also interesting to note that most of the participants only have between 100 GB and 249 GB free of charge space on their drives.
Games have been taking up more disk space for a while now. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s infamous 200+ GB size led to people buying SDDs just for that one title before players could remove game mods they didn’t need. Borderlands 3: The Directors Cut goes up to 135GB, Red Dead Redemption goes up to 120GB, and Final Fantasy 15 Windows Edition goes up to 110GB. Don’t expect anything to change either. another 90GB will also be required for Diablo 4, while the final release of Baldur’s Gate 3 is said to hit 150GB.
According to Steam, the average American downloads games at 12MB per second, meaning it would take 3 hours and 28 minutes to download a 150GB title. And say a prayer for any users who have a data cap.
Aside from constantly deleting and installing, it seems like buying a large SSD is the best solution to a problem that won’t go away. You can always subscribe to GeForce Now Ultimate, but that comes with a lot of caveats.