In my reviews of the
Xbox Series X and
Xbox Series S, I pointed out that the ballooning size of modern video games was going to be problematic for the consoles going forward. Well, as much I like being proven right, I’m dismayed to tell you that I’ve already run out of storage on the Xbox Series X. And that’s the console with the most storage.
It should have been a cause for celebration: Yesterday, I received an email from Activision telling me that my Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War preorder could now be pre-loaded on my console so that I could begin playing it immediately on its release day next week, on November 12. So I powered up the Xbox Series X, searched for the title, navigated over to the store link, and pressed “Install All Now.”
I was told that I was out of storage space and would have to delete apps and/or games to make space.
Not good. What exactly was installed, you ask? Just six games: Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (from the multiplayer beta), Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Dirt 5, Gears 5, and Halo: The Master Chief Collection.
I uninstalled that latter title because it was taking up over 100 GB of space, and I’m playing those games on the PC anyway. But I later realized that I could have removed the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War beta and saved ~77 GB right there, since the full game downloaded next to it and I now have two entries for the same game in my Games list.
Anyway, that’s beside the point. With just 802 GB of free space on its 1 TB of internal storage, my Xbox Series X was full with just six titles installed.
Six. Maybe this problem is yet another reason why Microsoft is pushing cloud game streaming these days: Games are getting too big to be stored locally on a console. And this problem is even more acute on the Xbox Series S, which arrives with a paltry 364 GB of available space.