Microsoft has been championing its Game Pass service for years now, and this week the brand finally made its consoles compatible with the entire catalog at once. A recent update made 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Xbox Series X hard drives of up to 16TB usable with the 𒊎console, and the crowd went✱ wild. In truth, though, it's not going to be the everyday players who benefit from this update - it's the content creators among us.

Whether you’re sporting an Xbox Series X/S, or a PS5, one of the necessities to having a good time with your beloved console is having plenty of storage. That’s especially the case if you mainly play digital games and are subscribed to every gaming service under the sun. Yet, while you can easily pick up a PS5 SSD from a huge range of brands to give your Sony console a boost, Xbox owners don’t h𝐆ꦕave it as easy.

Only two brands, Western and Digital and Seagate, make the expansion card formatted drives compatible with Xbox consoles, so you’re a lot more limited. Instead, you'll likely be reaching for a larger 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:SSD for gaming, only to slow it down by plugging into a USB slot. See, the size of that hard drive was never really an issue - I want more updates on where 🐽I play my games from.

Modern games have been increasing in size dramatically over the last few years, that’s undeniable. While base games, like Rare’s Sea of Thieves can launch at around 30GB, updates can compound that significantly. Sea of Thieves was a 27GB install on day one, but an update during February 2024 holstered it to 100GB. Today, it's pretty common to start at this position - Baldur’s Gate 3 on the Xbox Series X/S launched at 137.55GB when it was finally ported over𓃲. That's before the numerous patches, updates, a꧅nd DLC that can quickly take your storage hostage and leave you deleting games just to make way for new ones.

I can see why having the oꦅption of over 16TB wo♎rth of storage at your disposal would be attractive, especially if you want to keep online games like Sea of Thieves permanently on your Xbox to play whenever the moment takes you.

But to put it into context, 16TB is over 116.3 (16000÷137.55) digital copies of Baldur’s Gate 3. And as much as I adore Astarion and his alluring vampire ways, that’s a lot of Baldur’s Gate 3. I don’t know anyone currently (and actively) playing over a hundred fantasy RPGs at any♑ given time, or that many games of any genre for that matter. Even my own personal backlog, which gets worse every day, is not enough to warrant over 16,000GB of space.

There is definitely a benefit to having all your re💛cently played games installed in one place. That way you can dive right back in as the moment suits you. I know I struggle to archive games - who knows if, in a few weeks time, I won’t be itching to replay and will have to sit and wait as such a huge file redownloads all over again. Even though I haven’t touched it in months, I a𝓰ctively refuse to delete Fortnite on my PS5 as it’s over 90GB worth of a slow download that I don’t have the patience to wait for again.

Where this new announcement from 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Microsoft feels even truly impractical is that you can’t run all games through a USB drive (some manage to slip through the cracks). Instead, you have to move your game over to the Xbox Series X/S’s SSD or expansion card to play it. So while Microsoft has rolled out the support for larger USB drives, that’s over 16TB worth of games you still have to transfer over to your main console storage to run in the first place. I would have been singing a different tune if Microsoft had given the Xbox the same grace it does PC, where you can easily store and play as many games as you like from the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best external hard drives on the market.

There is one circumstance where I can see having compatibility with such a vast amount of storage might come in handy𝐆. Those who love saving long stretches of gameplay for sharing with their friends online or creating their own content, could very much benefit from fewer limitations with storage. At the time of writing, Seagate has a 20TB external drive on the market, which is definitely not cheap, but would be plenty of space to constantly save long Sea of Thieves clips.

I regularly save Dead by Daylight online mat♍ches with friends to watch (and laugh at) later on, and with entire matches easily taking upwards of 30 minutes, that can take a lot of storage space. Especially as the Xbox Series ꦯX saves video clips by default at a 4K resolution.

Having new compatibility with extra storage is never a bad thing - and I’m sure there are people out there who🌟 will actually benefit from Microsoft adding this new support. Otherwise, why would they be taking the time to integrate it in the first place? At least it’s shown me that there are Xbox fans out there who need even 20TB worth of space to download their games. Which, in turn, means there a🀅re people with worse gaming backlogs than me and I’m more than okay with that.