Mandatory installs were the way both the Xbone and PS4 systems were designed. Luckily, the PS4 installs are lighting fast by comparison to my Xbone...but it's annoying that installs can take up precious HDD space on both my consoles, even for my 2TB Batman PS4 HDD. Luckily, installs are easy to delete without any risk to the game saves.
The question is why? Well, these games are massive, bigger than ever before.
The transfer rates on HDD are much quicker than on a blu-ray drive which is a huge benefit to the gamer.
The big reason that games have to be installed on the harddrive is that it’s simply faster to access things from the harddrive compared to the Blu-ray drive. Despite the fact that the Blu-ray drive in the PlayStation 4 is 3 times faster than the one in the PS3, the BD drive speed is still no match for the harddrive.
Game developers also complained to Sony about long loading times, so Sony simply went ahead and made sure that all games on the PlayStation 4 install automatically to the harddrive. The process happens automatically and runs in the background. According to PS4 creator Mark Cerny, players will have to wait about 10 seconds the first time they start playing. After they start playing the transfer happens in the background while the game runs.
For example, Knack will take up 37 GB of disk space on the PlayStation 4, but players won’t have to transfer all of that at once. It happens seamlessly in the background as the game goes on.
As for storage space, Cerny says that they thought of automatically deleting the cache on the harddrive, since it takes up so much space. But they decided against it, and instead left it up to the user to delete game content on the console.
tl;dr?
We gamers are getting much faster loading times, but now we are being tasked with managing installs. I'll take it though. Every single game that allowed for an optional install on PS3, I ALWAYS DID IT. When the Xbox 360 finally allowed installs, I ALWAYS DID IT. I for one love the benefits of faster loading.
Life is too short, GAME ON!
Log in to comment