# Script
Modern gaming has brought so much to our lives, but it’s
completely unsustainable. From ballooning storage requirements to games constantly going offline,
to vanishing content that YOU PAID FOR… It’s a mess.
My favorite console this generation is the PlayStation 5. It looks silly,
has an incredible controller with some of the lowest input latency you can possibly get,
Still inexplicably lacks 1440p support, but has a wonderful games library,
but I had to stop buying next-gen games altogether. Elden Ring?
Haven’t played it. Hell, Ghost of Tsushima? - I own it and still haven’t played it. I
bought Assassin’s Creed Valhalla when I got my PS5 and still haven’t been able to install it.
Why, you ask? Because I don’t have the space. With less than a terabyte of actually usable space,
I can only really keep a few PS4 and PS5 games installed at any given time, and if
you’re playing any of the popular multiplayer games, good luck even having a few other games.
With the way I play games, it takes me a very long time to finish them. Which means I like
keeping a fair bit of backlog installed to hop between. But I also LOVE multiplayer games. And I
need to keep a couple consistent games installed for sample captures for my
capture card reviews and such. So this… has been a problem. Not a PS5-exclusive problem, though.
I have similar issues on Xbox, but most of the bigger Xbox games I have been playing on
PC first and thus just don’t install on my Xbox when space is limited anymore anyway.
But hell, even on mobile - Call of Duty mobile eats up like 15GB on its own! Maybe more,
it’s been a while since I last checked. Diablo Immortal is 11GB! I don’t have that kind of
space on my phone and have to just keep them installed on my iPad as a gaming tablet instead.
Back to the PS5, I finally said “enough is enough” and decided while I was already making
it my own with some dope paint-splatter for my side panels, I went ahead and added in a SSD. I
was already using a USB C SSD for my PS4 games to keep them from eating up space - though I’ve
consistently had bad luck where it keep saying my drive is corrupt and needs reformatted,
despite using multiple known-good SSDs… it seems overly-sensitive to hiccups. BUT the PlayStation
5 has an empty M.2 NVMe slot available for you to put a second SSD into. It’s gotta be
a fast one to play PS5 games from - one that can keep up with the internal SSD. For this,
SK Hynix sent me one of their new Platinum P41 SSDs. These are PCIe 4.0 SSDs that can write
at 6.5GB/s and read at 7GB/s. They’re WILD. But they get HOT. A big issue when putting drives in
your PS5 is that you can’t just put them in bare. You need a heatsink or cooler for them. For this,
I actually went with Sabrent’s dedicated PS5 cooler option. They sent me this with a big
4TB drive they sent over for my new workstation PC build. While I’d love to drop a 4TB into my PS5, I
can’t justify it when my PC needed it. But the PS5 heatsink is only $16
and I’d strongly recommend grabbing this with any drive that doesn’t have a beefy cooler already.
***[WORKBENCH]***
To get started, pop the side panel off of your PS5. You do this by lifting up at the
corner near the PS logo and pushing up and to the right. It took me quite a few tries - I thought
I might break it at first - but then it will shift loose and be easier to remove next time.
Then you remove the screw holding this metal plate down and remove the plate.
Next, remove the screw and little metal spacer ring at the top of the slot.
Insert your SSD. If yours came with a pre-installed cooler, just screw it in with
the spacer and screw. If it doesn’t, remove the top sticker and install it, then grab your Sabrent
cooler. This uses a sticky thermal pad to stick to the drive, absorb its heat, and distribute
it away from the drive. It actually replaces the metal slot cover that comes with the PS5.
If you’re using a normal drive with its own cooler, reinstall this metal plate.
This is why I recommend getting the Sabrent cooler with any drive, it’s more robust than what most
come with and replaces the slot cover in a way that ensures your drive stays cool, I love it.
Close up your PS5 and give it a boot. It’ll ask if you’re sure you want to reformat your drive
for use in the console and run a speed test. If your drive is too slow to run games from, it will
give you a warning here. But as you can see, we get a 6.5GB/s write speed and are good to go.
But before you start installing new games, make sure you go to your
Storage settings and tell your system to install new games to the new SSD,
or you’re still going to fill up the internal drive. This is also a good opportunity to go
ahead and shift some games around, balance out your space. I can finally crack open
some of these games I haven’t had a chance to play and get them installed and updated,
and download Apex and Warzone to try. It’ll just… take a while. A long while.
You might be asking why I’m focusing on the PlayStation here and not the Xbox that I also
have storage troubles with. Well, the Xbox doesn’t use a standard M.2 connection, instead relying on
a custom “expansion slot” and the drives just aren’t at the right price point yet that it
makes sense to me. They’ve been out TWO years and a 2TB Xbox expansion drive is still $300, $50
more than the brand new top-of-the-line SK Hynix SSD that you can use in almost
anything. It’s a rip-off, as CF Express has kind of always been. Now we did cover the conversion
adapters on Streamer Newz last year, but those only really support 2230-sized drives, which
Steam Deck owners know are tough to get in useful capacities and speeds.
I’ve also done this process on older consoles, too! My original Xbox, PlayStation 2 AND
PlayStation 3 all run 2TB SATA SSDs inside housing tons of games and making sure they’re
loaded for the future. While SATA SSD speeds don’t help for normal gameplay on older systems,
they make a WORLD of difference when scrolling through big game lists or transferring games TO
them, and after years of fighting with slow hard drives for PS2 transfers, it was finally worth it.
The only one left hanging is the Xbox 360 with its proprietary filesystem setup.
***[Games set]***
The thing is… it’s not just about storage. Oh boo hoo don’t have enough terabytes in
your hard to get game console to store your $70 games, or GamePass downloads. First world
problems. The past 5 to 10 years have also seen massive amounts of gaming experiences
just completely vanish and become unplayable or inaccessible - even if you paid for it.
From vaulted content in Destiny to server shutdowns leaving owners of Lawbreakers
out their money with only a few short months of possible playtime - less if you
bought the physical release through Limited Run like I stupidly did. 😐
It’s so bizarre to me that I can still go back and regularly play nearly EVERY SINGLE classic first
person shooter that I played 10, even 20 years ago, (and make lots of videos on over on the
lost_saves channel wink wink) but so many that I was late to the party on or didn’t get much
time in from the past decade are just gone. This isn’t by accident. Publishers have made
it standard practice to stop supporting player- and community-hosted servers, offline bots,
LAN party support - all the features that were considered bare minimum REQUIREMENTS for so long.
Combine that with mod support being something that younger gamers see as a revolutionary
concept when it used to be weirder to NOT exist before drip-feed DLC became a thing… it’s hard to
WANT to buy into new games when you’re not sure how long you’ll actually get to play them for.
I’ve mostly been talking about multiplayer experiences, but this affects singleplayer games,
too. There’s been weird licensing disputes over music affecting games like GTA and Rock Band,
of course. But this week, Ubisoft just announced that they’re sunsetting a lot of their online
services which not only takes multiplayer experiences for their older games offline - but
also means PC players won’t even be able to download or access DLC for their older Assassin’s
Creed games - content they paid money for - either! How is that acceptable? And kids wonder
why boomers like myself prefer having all of our game content safely stored on mirror frisbees.
Hell, even those aren’t useful on newer consoles, with entire Twitter accounts
being dedicated to whether or not you can just play a standard, singleplayer game
without internet access, even with a disc.
And then, of course, we get to the business models within the games themselves.
Look, I’ve been around a long time. I may dress like a 12-year-old, but I’ve played
shareware games where you get a shady floppy from a small store or are expected to mail a check off
to someone’s home address listed in a text file on the disk or downloaded from a listserv, I’ve seen
the rise of (and backlash against) map packs and mod distributions, expansion packs, hidden levels
discs, up to the drama of DLC existing at all to “Day 1 DLC” being the worst thing, horse armor,
hats, retailer-exclusive pre-order bonuses, now to this insane drip-feed “live service” model.
Every step of the way, paying more for a game than the original asking price has been seen as
nothing but greed and the worst thing ever, but only a few short years pass before that strategy
becomes the norm and gamers get squeezed for more. Publishers have made it so it’s basically seen as
desirable to release unfinished, buggy games at launch with all the multiplayer maps and modes
that would have normally been part of the $60 package or $15 map pack release being packed into
a Battle Pass or season system instead. Because if they just released with a healthy set of maps
in the first place and didn’t have a 9-month DLC roadmap planned, there’s “no content” and it’s
immediately a “dead game.” Now that’s crumbling via games developed during the pandemic, too.
Gamers aren’t exempt either, letting developers get away with SEVEN plus YEARS of games released
with horrible performance and frame pacing that requires literally 2 lines of code to fix,
all because it lets them be complete assholes to those who don’t have the patience or skill - or
just have disabilities - to make it over the difficulty curve. Two lines of code. Lance
figured it out years ago. Would have been an easy patch then, zero excuse to still be a bug now.
And on top of it all, gamers have to reconcile with the ethics of not supporting games developed
by a bunch of rapists, but also knowing that not supporting those games doesn’t
exactly hurt the right people to begin with. Plus those same publishers keep cannibalizing
other studios that make amazing games to be janitors for their cash cows instead.
Part of the reasons gamers lose more and more ownership over their games come from
the trade-off of them being more and more social experiences. Everything’s online now.
But the more gaming communities I feel I have to distance myself from,
because every fandom just becomes a toxic hellhole once they get big enough,
the more I question if that was ever the right idea. Remember when the internet was
something we “logged in” to and “logged out” of, and left all of that behind once we did?
I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t even entirely know why I’m making this
video - I don’t usually like complaining about stuff. I spend as much time as I possibly can
unfollowing and avoiding people who love to simmer in the constant negativity surrounding gaming,
as to me games are supposed to be a leisure activity you use for escapism and fun,
and soaking up negativity about it every day rots your brain. But something’s got to give.
Was this video just an excuse to finally upgrade my PS5 SSD and show off its new coat of paint?
Maybe! But I also really just wanted to get some things off my chest. Modern gaming is
unsustainable, and I’d really like the powers at be in the industry to figure it’s sh*t out
before the whole empire crumbles down again. I love games. I spend every day surrounded
by my favorite games for a reason. Let’s not lose everything we built. I want my kid to be
able to enjoy a new game without waiting hours for everything from his console to his game to
his controller and TV remote to update, to have to uninstall his favorite games
to just try something new, and to not miss out on incredible experiences just because
the vocal flock on Twitter said it was doo-doo because it has women in it.
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Remember how games used to be. Remember the magic. And remember: Be kind, rewind.