One of the biggest strengths of the PS5, at least according to Sony, is the incredible speed of its SSD. But the games have to fit on that SSD in order to benefit and, despite the console's massive size, it only contains 825GB of storage.
While that may sound like a fair amount of space, CNET found the listed sizes for both Spider-Man: Miles Morales Ultimate Edition and Demon's Souls on Sony's PlayStation Direct site and, if these are any indication, then you might only be able to fit a handful of AAA games on your PS5 at any one time.
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Why just a handful? Remember, the full 825GB of storage in the PS5 isn't available to users as the console needs some of that space for the operating system. Sony hasn't confirmed the available storage yet, but rumors suggest it could be in the neighborhood of 100GB itself, bringing your available space for games or other content on your PS5 down to just north of 700GB.
The storage capacity for PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Digital Edition is 825GB. It is not 1TB with 175 GB reserved for the system software. 825 GB is written on the retail box. You are getting just over 700 GB user available storage space on the SSD #PS5 pic.twitter.com/IAfLnVO7LwAugust 20, 2020
Spider-Man Miles Morales Ultimate Edition is a pretty heavy hitter to be sure as it includes the original 2018 Spider-Man along with what Sony has called "an expansion and an enhancement to the previous game." At a total of 105GB, it will take up roughly 1/7 of the available space on your PS5. Demon's Souls, the remake of the hit 2009 PS3 title, will use a much more reasonable 66GB of storage, or about 1/11 of your total.
Now, there are plenty of games at or below the 50GB mark on the PS4, but the trend has certainly been larger games taking up more storage. Additionally, a number of recent AAA games have come in right around that 100GB mark. This includes hits like Red Dead Redemption 2 (89GB), Last of Us Part II (100GB), Elder Scrolls Online (86GB) and behemoths like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Destiny 2 at around 175 and 165GB, respectively, when fully patched and updated.
We'll be keeping tabs on the size of new next-gen games across both consoles as this could be problematic on the Xbox side as well. The Xbox Series X has a slightly larger 1TB drive compared to the PS5, but the Xbox Series S drops that to "only" 512GB. Microsoft has said that Series S games will be about 30% smaller thanks to them not needing the 4K graphics assets, but with a 50% smaller hard drive, that could still spell space problems pretty quickly.
All of the next-gen consoles do offer storage expansion options with the Seagate Storage Expansion Card on the Xbox side and a more open but specific list of compatible drives on the PS5 side. In both cases, there has been a lack of detail regarding pricing and the performance ramifications of running games off external SSDs.
