I am starting to firsthand experience this whole modern video game thing as a whole. I already had the Switch before, but as a Nintendo thing, it’s still a bit different from the typical modern thing. Having recently acquired a PS4, however, I’m seeing what one of the big powerful consoles can do, even though it’s not the super advanced model.
First thing is that you only get so much space, but it’ll never be enough if you want to regularly play more than a few games. Even if you get a model with a whole terabyte of space (minus whatever for formatting). Some games, of course, are smaller than others, but if you’re looking at a typical AAA game, it’s going to be around over 50 GB. If you play a lot of those, the smaller drive of 500 GB will be full after 7-8 games. Roughly double that for the terabyte. I suppose for smaller libraries, that’s not too bad. Still, though it is much bigger than the Switch built-in storage, it feels tight. In contrast, I have a lot of games installed on my PC, and on the primary drive alone, roughly 500 GB as well.
Another thing is that the games have to install pretty much everything, which leads to the above case. The physical copy install speed can vary, as the discs seem to install whatever they need to at first within a minute on the PS4, but if they need to install even more data, it does it from the game, and that can take maybe an hour. As I’ve been messing with the Call of Duty campaigns I hadn’t played yet, I noticed that the campaigns were generally installed last. They really push the multiplayer despite having a fair bit of effort put into the campaigns, but I already knew this. Plus, on top of everything, there’s probably a cumulative many gigabytes of patches to download.
With the push to digital, ISPs are still behind with made-up things such as bandwidth limits, so maybe you can install one or two games digitally for a month, depending on the provider. That’s about as many as they get monthly on whatever premium online service the console pushes. Online is paid now, that’s another thing. If you don’t play on PC (or phone I guess), you pay for the online. I still don’t think I’ll be doing any of that for the time being.
However, at least the games can be found cheaply in the right places, sometimes a local game store or other place with used merchandise has some good finds, even the consoles themselves. That much is nice. It’s the reusing part of the cycles. Provided everything’s in functional condition, of course.