I mean, in principle they're obviously fine with that kind of modularity. The PS4 is already designed to do exactly what you're describing. Unlike the XB1 which you need to take completely apart (and go through the hassle of cloning the drive too) just to swap the internal hard drive, the PS4 is literally designed with a little hatch to allow users to easily take out the 2.5" HDD and replace it with another 2.5" SATA drive, whether it's another HDD or even an SSD.
However... this might not be viable with the PS5. If they're going to go with a proprietary SSD for the sake of maximizing performance, the whole point of doing so is to provide a COMPLETELY standardized system which allows developers to be confident they can take full advantage of all of its capabilities. If the PS5 allows off-the-shelf drives to be used as well, then developers are suddenly required to make sure their games still perform well on storage that might be significantly slower, because developers aren't going to want to make a game for the PS5 that will only work on some of them. Not to mention it'd be totally unacceptable for somebody to buy a game only to find out it can't be played on their PS5. So it would result in developers simply NEVER designing their games to take full advantage of the performance offered by the proprietary drive. And if that's going to be the case, then there's just no longer going to be any reason for Sony to be using a proprietary SSD in the first place. Why would ANYBODY want to pay extra for a super high-performance drive that not a single developer is going to ever be able to justify making use of?
So the fact they're going with some sort of proprietary storage at all pretty much ensures that they're not going to let you run PS5 games off of any other kind of drive. I'm sure external drives will still be supported though, as it will make way more sense to use it for backward compatible PS4 games rather than needlessly using up space on the really fast drive. And ideally we'll be able to use that external storage to move PS5 games on and off the proprietary SSD as needed, instead of having to redownload/re-install from disc every single time.
Had they just decided to go with a simple m.2 internal drive in the first place, then in all likelihood they'd have designed the PS5 to have the sort of modularity you're talking about, allowing users to swap m.2 drives just as easily as the PS4 currently allows you to do so with SATA drives. But given that they've apparently decided to standardize the system around an SSD that should even be significantly faster, there's almost no chance of that unless for some reason they decide to include a slot for you to add an ADDITIONAL internal drive (though again, not to run PS5 games off of), which is still extremely unlikely, even if the much smaller footprint of m.2 drives means it might not be completely out of the question this time around.
The original Wired reveal back in April where the Spider-Man loading times were shown off contains the following couple paragraphs:
"Solid-state drives have been available in budget laptops for more than a decade, and the Xbox One and PS4 both offer external SSDs that claim to improve load times. But not all SSDs are created alike. As Cerny points out, “I have an SSD in my laptop, and when I want to change from Excel to Word I can wait 15 seconds.” What’s built into Sony’s next-gen console is something a little more specialized.
[...]
At the moment, Sony won’t cop to exact details about the SSD—who makes it, whether it utilizes the new PCIe 4.0 standard—but Cerny claims that it has a raw bandwidth higher than any SSD available for PCs. That’s not all. “The raw read speed is important,“ Cerny says, “but so are the details of the I/O [input-output] mechanisms and the software stack that we put on top of them. I got a PlayStation 4 Pro and then I put in a SSD that cost as much as the PlayStation 4 Pro—it might be one-third faster." As opposed to 19 times faster for the next-gen console, judging from the fast-travel demo."
Not sure what people were expecting, because the point being made in the last couple sentences is absolutely correct. Simply using an off-the-shelf SSD will definitely NOT give you the improvement in speed that's been observed. And we know that Sony intends such blistering read speed to allow developers to do much more than simply reduce loading times, which is why they're necessitating that games be installed to it... if they succeed in this ambition and the speed really does get used in ways that makes it fundamentally necessary for actual gameplay to work as the developers intended, then you obviously can't have some players running the game off an HDD (or worse, optical media), but even trying to run a game off an off-the-shelf SSD could potentially make some games literally unplayable.
So putting two and two together, it seemed obvious from day one that if the SSD they were using was really going to be anywhere near as fast as they claimed, there's only two(-ish) ways the expandable storage could pan out. Either:
1a) The main storage was only going to be expandable with a proprietary type of SSD, which would obviously be patented.
1b) Still a proprietary format, but they could possibly license the technology out for wider adoption, allowing other companies to make them too (though they'd have to strongly enforce minimum performance specs) and potentially even making them available for use in PCs and notebooks as well. The viability of this depends on what exactly makes the drives so much faster with the PS5, but regardless, you're still going to see same patents as you would with 1a.
2) The main storage was never going to be expandable at all.
This particular patent may end up having nothing to do with th PS5's storage. For all we know it could be for something like a portable version of PS4 or PS5 games. Either way though, I don't know about you, but given the choice, I'd rather have the ability to choose to expand the PS5's main storage with a proprietary SSD than have no choice at all. I'd prefer option 1b, but this depends on a few things, not least of which is that what makes the proprietary format faster for a PS5 will be legitimately just as useful for PCs as well. But since it's actually possible it may not be, it might not end up making sense as a wider SSD standard, in which case option 1a would still be better than not having any choice at all.
I think it's kind of silly to suggest Sony's gaming division didn't learn anything from past issues with all their proprietary formats. Hell, in terms of increasing external storage, the PS4 went out of its way to make swapping the drive out for a larger one of your choice as easy as possible. And that was obviously a very deliberate choice when you compare it to the that to the XB1, where you pretty much need to jump through hoops totally dismantling the console and cloning the drive to do it because they didn't really want you to. By all accounts, Sony wants to make adoption of the PS5 as frictionless as possible in order to PS4 owners moving up to a PS5 at an unprecedented rate, shooting for things like as much backward compatibility as possible and going with such a big jump in specs compared to what anybody really expected that you pretty much have to expect that the the PS5 will be being sold, at least initially, at a loss (though with Sony selling not only games but making money through a bunch of subscription services as well, pushing a console on which they lose money on every unit sold makes a lot more sense than it did in the past). Bottom line is that it's hard to imagine Sony needlessly going with proprietary storage simply to make a bit of money forcing PS5 owners who want to expand their storage to buy a proprietary format – for one, this is a lesson they've already demonstrated they've learned, but they're also well aware that any drastic missteps will be immediately taken advantage of by Microsoft, and that, especially with the way consoles are no longer just machines that boot up games but are now major ecosystems that are very socially-oriented as well, it's more important than ever that they keep the momentum of their current success going without a hitch. Because if they alienate users with stuff like needless proprietary BS, the vast majority of people who decide to go from a PS4 to a next-gen Xbox (let's call it XB2) in the first year or so are not only going to be locking themselves into the XB2 ecosystem for the next 7+ years and probably not even getting a PS5 at all, but they're also likely going to take their friend groups with them! There's no way they're going to risk going from the second-best selling console of all time to giving Microsoft all that marketshare due to BS like nickle-and-diming gamers with overpriced, needlessly proprietary storage expansion, especially after only having gotten to that position clawing their way back from the relative flop that was the PS3 immediately after the generation where they had the best-selling console ever made (the PS2).
It shouldn't be too hard to tell their intentions once we have all the details. If I'm right, the PS5 will still allow you to hook up most HDDs and SSDs of your choice externally in the exact same way that PS4s do (though maybe USB-C rather than USB 3.0), expect for one key difference: you won't be able to play installed games directly off of the external drive like we're currently able to. It already seems like a sure thing that we won't be able to play games right off am external drive, but hopefully Sony will compensate for that (as well the lower overall storage space we WILL be able to run installed games from) by adding a feature that lets us swap installed games between internal and external storage. No need to download games again, or install them from disc again, or even to install them at all... I'm talking about game files that are already installed and merely need to be moved to the internal storage to be played, but can be transferred to an external drive to make room on the internal when you're not playing it. In their installed form, they could even be automatically kept up to date with patches like installed games normally do. Yeah, I'd rather have a 4GB internal drive where I wouldn't have to mess around with stuff like that in the first place, but if the PS5 truly does end up containing an SSD faster than anything availablle for PCs, I don't mind the compromise of being able to store fewer games on the internal drive, ESPECIALLY if I can swap install files in the way I just described. To be clear though, that's not something I've even heard hinted at by Sony, it just makes way too much sense for them to not have given such a feature serious thought when you consider the LOWER amount of storage available for installed games that we're almost definitely going to see, which is pretty unusual when you're talking about moving to a next-gen console, and kind of a major burden for players if we have to deal with this lower amount of space by downloading and/or installing a game from disc and fully re-patching every single time we want to play something not already installed on the internal drive. But if I'm just completely wrong about all of this and Sony really IS going with a totally unnecessary proprietary format for expanding the system's storage simply to profit off of the overpriced sale of these drives/cartridges, then we won't see any of what I just mentioned. Because in that case, letting you use any external HDD or SSD you want for doing everything other than directly running games off of would significantly cut into those sales as well, and if they're going to risk losing marketshare by alienating their users with needlessly propietary stuff anyway – especially something as critically important and as widely (and fairly cheaply, these days) available in various standards as storage happens to be – they might as well go all the way. No point in losing revenue by pissing off potential PS5 owners with your own artificial monopoly if you're also going to lose further potential revenue by not actually exploiting that monopoly to any real extent. But I'd bet pretty significant money that's not how it's going to work out. Sony hasn't really given any actual indication, but it should be pretty safe to assume that external HDDs and SSDs will still work like they do with the PS4, and let you do pretty much anything you could do before... in fact maybe even literally so, as backward compatibility is an important focus for them, and unlike their ambitions for PS5 games, there's no technical reason that any PS4 game would NEED to be installed on the internal SSD. After all, every single PS4 game is already fully able to be run directly from an install on a USB 3.0 external drive, even a 5400rpm HDD with no separate power source.
And yet, even with the best intentions, it could still kind of end up being needlessly proprietary. Because for all the ambition they have in how such unprecedented storage speeds could enable totally new things in gameplay that had just literally not been possible up until now, developers are still going to have to come up with these things in actual practice, using this speed to contribute to such a superior gaming experience that it very clearly demonstrates to gamers that forcing people to use a proprietary storage format was the obviously correct choice. Which might be easier said than done. Again, simply cutting down on loading times won't suffice, because, as nice as it is to virtually do away with them altogether, there's no reason a person shouldn't have the CHOICE of using their own cheaper and larger drives at the cost of having longer loading times, no matter how significant they might be; to be able to actually justify Sony forcing the use of their own storage, devs will have to push the propietary storage speeds to the limit during gameplay, creating experiences that wouldn't be possible with the game reading from a slower drive in real-time. And a game designed like that wouldn't really be able to be ported to a next-gen XBox unless Microsoft does something similar, or to most (if not all) PCs, without fundamentally altering these parts of the game, so most devs are not particularly likely to even bother attempting using such fast storage to its fullest capability.
So I guess we'll have to just wait and see what devs will do with the capability. Consoles are all about simplifying through standardization. Unlike with a PC, devs know exactly what kind of CPU, GPU, and RAM architecture and performance they'll be working with, and they can design their games to fit within those limitations, but it also allows devs to maximize graphics quality and performance within those limitations. But storage performance has been utter crap for so long, and unlike the rest of the components, hasn't really been a part of that standardization with modern consoles. Even as SSDs came out and HDDs got even just somewhat better, devs essentially had to work with the assumption of a fairly crappy HDD for everyone. IIRC, one of the Wired articles even talks about some tricks they've used to maximize the performance of HDDs, like some identical pieces of (high demand) data being copied and stored hundreds of times within a game's files, keeping them right next to other pieces of data that might be needed at the same time, all in order to minimize any seeking done by the HDD. And yet, while console games have been designed to a single standard spec for all other components, allowing devs to be totally okay with games even not being able to run at all on lower specs (since a standard PS4 with lower specs than the standardized PS4 specs they expect won't actually exist), they've never been able to say the same for an SSD. Are there even any PC games that are designed for SSDs at an absolute minimum? So treating the storage like everything else and standardizing it to a high performance component rather than the lowest common denominator could be massively liberating for developers. But Sony seems to be going even further than just standardizing to the spec of an average off-the-shelf SSD, going from barely any requirements at all for the drive's performance to something (supposedly) faster than anybody has ever really previously gamed with. There's massively exciting potential, and yet it might even end up having been excessive if the only games that even try to make full use of it are a handful of first-party exclusives. It might seem like "just" storage and hard to envision how much of a significant difference it could make in games outside of loading times, but really, that's only because up until now, games have ALWAYS been developed with the necessity of being able to run pretty flawlessly on (or on the equivalent of) at least a mediocre HDD. This is something that's actually so unprecedented that it's hard to predict how much better games will be as a result of it, and the most creative and successful ways its full capabilities might be put to use. But ultimately, having a console standardized to such high specs truly across the board this time is really exciting, and if it means having using a proprietary storage format to run installed games off of in order to ensure games can be designed to such a high spec, then I'm more than happy to deal with that compromise, especially if Sony could create a way to keep excess game installs on an external HDD/SSD that can be swapped onto the internal storage to be played. And while I think it'd be such a bad decision on their part that it's just extremely unlikely, getting rid of external HDD/SSD support altogether would in all likelihood be a dealbreaker for me, because that's when it becomes obvious nickle-and-diming that clearly has absolutely nothing to do with improving the gaming experience.
Comments 3
Re: PS5 Launches 2nd February in India After Trademark Dispute
@Total_Weirdo You're thinking of the wrong kind of Indians
Re: Rumour: Is the Recently Patented PlayStation Cartridge Upgradable SSD Storage for PS5?
@Callmegil
I mean, in principle they're obviously fine with that kind of modularity. The PS4 is already designed to do exactly what you're describing. Unlike the XB1 which you need to take completely apart (and go through the hassle of cloning the drive too) just to swap the internal hard drive, the PS4 is literally designed with a little hatch to allow users to easily take out the 2.5" HDD and replace it with another 2.5" SATA drive, whether it's another HDD or even an SSD.
However... this might not be viable with the PS5. If they're going to go with a proprietary SSD for the sake of maximizing performance, the whole point of doing so is to provide a COMPLETELY standardized system which allows developers to be confident they can take full advantage of all of its capabilities. If the PS5 allows off-the-shelf drives to be used as well, then developers are suddenly required to make sure their games still perform well on storage that might be significantly slower, because developers aren't going to want to make a game for the PS5 that will only work on some of them. Not to mention it'd be totally unacceptable for somebody to buy a game only to find out it can't be played on their PS5. So it would result in developers simply NEVER designing their games to take full advantage of the performance offered by the proprietary drive. And if that's going to be the case, then there's just no longer going to be any reason for Sony to be using a proprietary SSD in the first place. Why would ANYBODY want to pay extra for a super high-performance drive that not a single developer is going to ever be able to justify making use of?
So the fact they're going with some sort of proprietary storage at all pretty much ensures that they're not going to let you run PS5 games off of any other kind of drive. I'm sure external drives will still be supported though, as it will make way more sense to use it for backward compatible PS4 games rather than needlessly using up space on the really fast drive. And ideally we'll be able to use that external storage to move PS5 games on and off the proprietary SSD as needed, instead of having to redownload/re-install from disc every single time.
Had they just decided to go with a simple m.2 internal drive in the first place, then in all likelihood they'd have designed the PS5 to have the sort of modularity you're talking about, allowing users to swap m.2 drives just as easily as the PS4 currently allows you to do so with SATA drives. But given that they've apparently decided to standardize the system around an SSD that should even be significantly faster, there's almost no chance of that unless for some reason they decide to include a slot for you to add an ADDITIONAL internal drive (though again, not to run PS5 games off of), which is still extremely unlikely, even if the much smaller footprint of m.2 drives means it might not be completely out of the question this time around.
Re: Rumour: Is the Recently Patented PlayStation Cartridge Upgradable SSD Storage for PS5?
@TowaHerschel7
The original Wired reveal back in April where the Spider-Man loading times were shown off contains the following couple paragraphs:
"Solid-state drives have been available in budget laptops for more than a decade, and the Xbox One and PS4 both offer external SSDs that claim to improve load times. But not all SSDs are created alike. As Cerny points out, “I have an SSD in my laptop, and when I want to change from Excel to Word I can wait 15 seconds.” What’s built into Sony’s next-gen console is something a little more specialized.
[...]
At the moment, Sony won’t cop to exact details about the SSD—who makes it, whether it utilizes the new PCIe 4.0 standard—but Cerny claims that it has a raw bandwidth higher than any SSD available for PCs. That’s not all. “The raw read speed is important,“ Cerny says, “but so are the details of the I/O [input-output] mechanisms and the software stack that we put on top of them. I got a PlayStation 4 Pro and then I put in a SSD that cost as much as the PlayStation 4 Pro—it might be one-third faster." As opposed to 19 times faster for the next-gen console, judging from the fast-travel demo."
Not sure what people were expecting, because the point being made in the last couple sentences is absolutely correct. Simply using an off-the-shelf SSD will definitely NOT give you the improvement in speed that's been observed. And we know that Sony intends such blistering read speed to allow developers to do much more than simply reduce loading times, which is why they're necessitating that games be installed to it... if they succeed in this ambition and the speed really does get used in ways that makes it fundamentally necessary for actual gameplay to work as the developers intended, then you obviously can't have some players running the game off an HDD (or worse, optical media), but even trying to run a game off an off-the-shelf SSD could potentially make some games literally unplayable.
So putting two and two together, it seemed obvious from day one that if the SSD they were using was really going to be anywhere near as fast as they claimed, there's only two(-ish) ways the expandable storage could pan out. Either:
1a) The main storage was only going to be expandable with a proprietary type of SSD, which would obviously be patented.
1b) Still a proprietary format, but they could possibly license the technology out for wider adoption, allowing other companies to make them too (though they'd have to strongly enforce minimum performance specs) and potentially even making them available for use in PCs and notebooks as well. The viability of this depends on what exactly makes the drives so much faster with the PS5, but regardless, you're still going to see same patents as you would with 1a.
2) The main storage was never going to be expandable at all.
This particular patent may end up having nothing to do with th PS5's storage. For all we know it could be for something like a portable version of PS4 or PS5 games. Either way though, I don't know about you, but given the choice, I'd rather have the ability to choose to expand the PS5's main storage with a proprietary SSD than have no choice at all. I'd prefer option 1b, but this depends on a few things, not least of which is that what makes the proprietary format faster for a PS5 will be legitimately just as useful for PCs as well. But since it's actually possible it may not be, it might not end up making sense as a wider SSD standard, in which case option 1a would still be better than not having any choice at all.
I think it's kind of silly to suggest Sony's gaming division didn't learn anything from past issues with all their proprietary formats. Hell, in terms of increasing external storage, the PS4 went out of its way to make swapping the drive out for a larger one of your choice as easy as possible. And that was obviously a very deliberate choice when you compare it to the that to the XB1, where you pretty much need to jump through hoops totally dismantling the console and cloning the drive to do it because they didn't really want you to. By all accounts, Sony wants to make adoption of the PS5 as frictionless as possible in order to PS4 owners moving up to a PS5 at an unprecedented rate, shooting for things like as much backward compatibility as possible and going with such a big jump in specs compared to what anybody really expected that you pretty much have to expect that the the PS5 will be being sold, at least initially, at a loss (though with Sony selling not only games but making money through a bunch of subscription services as well, pushing a console on which they lose money on every unit sold makes a lot more sense than it did in the past). Bottom line is that it's hard to imagine Sony needlessly going with proprietary storage simply to make a bit of money forcing PS5 owners who want to expand their storage to buy a proprietary format – for one, this is a lesson they've already demonstrated they've learned, but they're also well aware that any drastic missteps will be immediately taken advantage of by Microsoft, and that, especially with the way consoles are no longer just machines that boot up games but are now major ecosystems that are very socially-oriented as well, it's more important than ever that they keep the momentum of their current success going without a hitch. Because if they alienate users with stuff like needless proprietary BS, the vast majority of people who decide to go from a PS4 to a next-gen Xbox (let's call it XB2) in the first year or so are not only going to be locking themselves into the XB2 ecosystem for the next 7+ years and probably not even getting a PS5 at all, but they're also likely going to take their friend groups with them! There's no way they're going to risk going from the second-best selling console of all time to giving Microsoft all that marketshare due to BS like nickle-and-diming gamers with overpriced, needlessly proprietary storage expansion, especially after only having gotten to that position clawing their way back from the relative flop that was the PS3 immediately after the generation where they had the best-selling console ever made (the PS2).
It shouldn't be too hard to tell their intentions once we have all the details. If I'm right, the PS5 will still allow you to hook up most HDDs and SSDs of your choice externally in the exact same way that PS4s do (though maybe USB-C rather than USB 3.0), expect for one key difference: you won't be able to play installed games directly off of the external drive like we're currently able to. It already seems like a sure thing that we won't be able to play games right off am external drive, but hopefully Sony will compensate for that (as well the lower overall storage space we WILL be able to run installed games from) by adding a feature that lets us swap installed games between internal and external storage. No need to download games again, or install them from disc again, or even to install them at all... I'm talking about game files that are already installed and merely need to be moved to the internal storage to be played, but can be transferred to an external drive to make room on the internal when you're not playing it. In their installed form, they could even be automatically kept up to date with patches like installed games normally do. Yeah, I'd rather have a 4GB internal drive where I wouldn't have to mess around with stuff like that in the first place, but if the PS5 truly does end up containing an SSD faster than anything availablle for PCs, I don't mind the compromise of being able to store fewer games on the internal drive, ESPECIALLY if I can swap install files in the way I just described. To be clear though, that's not something I've even heard hinted at by Sony, it just makes way too much sense for them to not have given such a feature serious thought when you consider the LOWER amount of storage available for installed games that we're almost definitely going to see, which is pretty unusual when you're talking about moving to a next-gen console, and kind of a major burden for players if we have to deal with this lower amount of space by downloading and/or installing a game from disc and fully re-patching every single time we want to play something not already installed on the internal drive. But if I'm just completely wrong about all of this and Sony really IS going with a totally unnecessary proprietary format for expanding the system's storage simply to profit off of the overpriced sale of these drives/cartridges, then we won't see any of what I just mentioned. Because in that case, letting you use any external HDD or SSD you want for doing everything other than directly running games off of would significantly cut into those sales as well, and if they're going to risk losing marketshare by alienating their users with needlessly propietary stuff anyway – especially something as critically important and as widely (and fairly cheaply, these days) available in various standards as storage happens to be – they might as well go all the way. No point in losing revenue by pissing off potential PS5 owners with your own artificial monopoly if you're also going to lose further potential revenue by not actually exploiting that monopoly to any real extent. But I'd bet pretty significant money that's not how it's going to work out. Sony hasn't really given any actual indication, but it should be pretty safe to assume that external HDDs and SSDs will still work like they do with the PS4, and let you do pretty much anything you could do before... in fact maybe even literally so, as backward compatibility is an important focus for them, and unlike their ambitions for PS5 games, there's no technical reason that any PS4 game would NEED to be installed on the internal SSD. After all, every single PS4 game is already fully able to be run directly from an install on a USB 3.0 external drive, even a 5400rpm HDD with no separate power source.
And yet, even with the best intentions, it could still kind of end up being needlessly proprietary. Because for all the ambition they have in how such unprecedented storage speeds could enable totally new things in gameplay that had just literally not been possible up until now, developers are still going to have to come up with these things in actual practice, using this speed to contribute to such a superior gaming experience that it very clearly demonstrates to gamers that forcing people to use a proprietary storage format was the obviously correct choice. Which might be easier said than done. Again, simply cutting down on loading times won't suffice, because, as nice as it is to virtually do away with them altogether, there's no reason a person shouldn't have the CHOICE of using their own cheaper and larger drives at the cost of having longer loading times, no matter how significant they might be; to be able to actually justify Sony forcing the use of their own storage, devs will have to push the propietary storage speeds to the limit during gameplay, creating experiences that wouldn't be possible with the game reading from a slower drive in real-time. And a game designed like that wouldn't really be able to be ported to a next-gen XBox unless Microsoft does something similar, or to most (if not all) PCs, without fundamentally altering these parts of the game, so most devs are not particularly likely to even bother attempting using such fast storage to its fullest capability.
So I guess we'll have to just wait and see what devs will do with the capability. Consoles are all about simplifying through standardization. Unlike with a PC, devs know exactly what kind of CPU, GPU, and RAM architecture and performance they'll be working with, and they can design their games to fit within those limitations, but it also allows devs to maximize graphics quality and performance within those limitations. But storage performance has been utter crap for so long, and unlike the rest of the components, hasn't really been a part of that standardization with modern consoles. Even as SSDs came out and HDDs got even just somewhat better, devs essentially had to work with the assumption of a fairly crappy HDD for everyone. IIRC, one of the Wired articles even talks about some tricks they've used to maximize the performance of HDDs, like some identical pieces of (high demand) data being copied and stored hundreds of times within a game's files, keeping them right next to other pieces of data that might be needed at the same time, all in order to minimize any seeking done by the HDD. And yet, while console games have been designed to a single standard spec for all other components, allowing devs to be totally okay with games even not being able to run at all on lower specs (since a standard PS4 with lower specs than the standardized PS4 specs they expect won't actually exist), they've never been able to say the same for an SSD. Are there even any PC games that are designed for SSDs at an absolute minimum? So treating the storage like everything else and standardizing it to a high performance component rather than the lowest common denominator could be massively liberating for developers. But Sony seems to be going even further than just standardizing to the spec of an average off-the-shelf SSD, going from barely any requirements at all for the drive's performance to something (supposedly) faster than anybody has ever really previously gamed with. There's massively exciting potential, and yet it might even end up having been excessive if the only games that even try to make full use of it are a handful of first-party exclusives. It might seem like "just" storage and hard to envision how much of a significant difference it could make in games outside of loading times, but really, that's only because up until now, games have ALWAYS been developed with the necessity of being able to run pretty flawlessly on (or on the equivalent of) at least a mediocre HDD. This is something that's actually so unprecedented that it's hard to predict how much better games will be as a result of it, and the most creative and successful ways its full capabilities might be put to use. But ultimately, having a console standardized to such high specs truly across the board this time is really exciting, and if it means having using a proprietary storage format to run installed games off of in order to ensure games can be designed to such a high spec, then I'm more than happy to deal with that compromise, especially if Sony could create a way to keep excess game installs on an external HDD/SSD that can be swapped onto the internal storage to be played. And while I think it'd be such a bad decision on their part that it's just extremely unlikely, getting rid of external HDD/SSD support altogether would in all likelihood be a dealbreaker for me, because that's when it becomes obvious nickle-and-diming that clearly has absolutely nothing to do with improving the gaming experience.