WTF?! Next-gen consoles are finally launching next week, and the hype train for both the Green and Blue team is running at full speed. However, budget-conscious Xbox fans may be a bit disappointed by today's news: the Xbox Series S -- Microsoft's cheaper all-digital console -- might only have 364GB of available storage space for games.
This information comes courtesy of Redditor spead20, who took to the XboxSeriesX subreddit to show off their brand-new Xbox Series S. Yes, you read that right -- in a serious stroke of luck, the user somehow snagged his console a full week early.
In the comments of his Reddit post (which shows an image of the Series S' box), one user asked spead20 how much of the Series S 512GB of storage is actually available to players. The Redditor responded by saying there's only "364 gb for games and apps," which is a pitifully low amount of storage for a next-gen console.
Developers may reduce texture sizes for their next-gen games to compensate for this lower storage, but even those optimizations might not be enough. For reference, Call of Duty: Warzone is already well over 200GB, which would eat up more than half of the Xbox Series S' storage capacity. Other modern games aren't much better -- Red Dead Redemption 2 takes up 150GB.
We don't expect that to change for newer games. Next-gen titles are only getting more complex, not less, and their installation sizes will undoubtedly continue to climb as a result. This news is particularly troublesome given that the Series S is an all-digital console: there are no discs that can offset the filesize.
if you've been considering snagging an Xbox Series S due to its lower price tag -- it's $300, whereas the Series X is $500 -- now might be the time to consider holding off and saving up that extra $200 for the higher-end model. Alternatively, you could always snag a high-speed external drive, when those become widely available.
It's worth pointing out that this is not official information. Since we haven't gotten our hands on a Series S ourselves, we can't confirm spead20's assessment; even if does seem rather likely to be true. Either way, none of us will be waiting long to find out the truth: both the Series S and X are arriving on November 10.
Image credit: ESOlex
https://www.techspot.com/news/87455-xbox-series-s-might-only-have-364gb-space.html
