The first PlayStation 5 game file size details suggest that the console’s flagship launch titles could take up a significant chunk of the console’s 825GB SSD.
As revealed on the updated PlayStation website, first-party launch title Demon’s Souls will require a “minimum” of 66GB SSD space, while Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales will require 50GB.
The Ultimate Edition of Miles Morales, which includes a PS5 remaster of Insomniac’s 2018 Spider-Man game, takes up a significant 105GB of memory space.
The figures suggest that for those who purchase the Ultimate Launch Edition of Miles Morales and Demon’s Souls at launch, 171GB – or 20 percent – of the PlayStation 5’s SSD space will be taken up by the two packages.
And owners of the more expensive disc drive version of the PS5 are unlikely to have much advantage over those with the Digital Edition console: Just like PS4, disc versions of PS5 games will be required to have their data transferred onto the console, this time to take advantage of the significant speed of the PlayStation 5’s SSD (5.5GB/s raw).
However, Sony has said PS5 will offer players more flexibility on how they manage their storage on the console, with users able to configure installations and choose to install just a game’s multiplayer campaign, or delete the single-player campaign once completed.
PS5 owners will also be able to expand their internal storage with Sony-certified, off-the-shelf SSDs. However, drives capable of PS5’s huge bandwidth will likely be expensive in the short term.
As Digital Foundry’s Rich Leadbetter explains: “In the short term at least, the advice is simple: don’t buy an NVMe drive without Sony validation if you plan to use it in PlayStation 5. Also remember that extreme bandwidth PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives are likely to be very expensive – in the short term, at least.
“This is cutting-edge technology, after all. Obviously though, the outlook should improve significantly as the next generation progresses – and prices do tend to drop significantly over time.”
PlayStation president Jim Ryan has said the platform holder is “doing our best” to predict demand for PS5’s Digital Edition console, following reports of low availability for pre-order.
Retailers around the world opened pre-orders for the two PlayStation 5 models this week. The standard edition will retail for $100 / £90 more than the Digital Edition ($400 / £360), which shares the same hardware specs but does not include a disc drive.
Asked to comment on PS5 Digital Edition’s availability by Japanese site AV Watch (translated by VGC), Jim Ryan would not comment on the ratio of Digital to standard consoles but said Sony would monitor demand and adjust production accordingly.
“The ratio between the Digital Edition and the disc drive model is currently something we cannot disclose at this time,” he said. “We cannot give specific information on numbers, but we can say that we plan to produce the necessary number of units to meet the demand for that model type.”
He added: “However, we’ve never produced two different console models at the same time before so deciding on the right number and the right ratio is very hard to know. We are doing our best to predict demand.”
