Sony ‘isn’t hearing’ PS5 storage criticism, says PlayStation CEO

Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan claims the company hasn’t received feedback suggesting consumers are concerned about the amount of storage space offered by PlayStation 5.

The newly-launched console reserves approximately 20 percent of its 825GB internal SSD storage for operating functions, leaving around 664GB usable for software – and some launch titles already take up a significant chunk of this.

Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War takes up a fifth of the available space, while NBA 2K21 and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales Ultimate Edition (which includes Spider-Man Remastered) also require over 100GB of storage space each.

• Related: PS5 storage upgrade guide - How to upgrade PS5's SSD storage

To complicate matters, PS5 doesn’t support expandable SSD storage at launch (the feature will be enabled via a future firmware update), and PS5 games can’t be stored on external hard drives, although Sony says it’s exploring ways to allow players to do so in the future.

Given all of the above, The Telegraph asked PlayStation boss Ryan if PS5’s available storage space is a problem for consumers.

“We’re not hearing that,” he claimed. “We’ll obviously watch what happens as people unbox their PlayStations and start to use them. We think we’ll be okay. We obviously are able to monitor harddrive usage on the PS4 microscopically and everything that we saw there indicates that we should be fine.”

PS5 does offer players more flexibility in how they manage their storage on the console, with users able to configure installations for some games and choose to install just a game’s multiplayer component or delete the single-player campaign once completed.

And PS5 owners will eventually 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 explained earlier this year: “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.

Further reading

Sony has released a trio of PlayStation 5 instructional videos

Showing how to use your account, customise settings and transfer data from PS4

“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.”

PS5 does support USB external storage, enabling users to play PS4 titles not stored on the next-gen console.

In the same Telegraph interview, Ryan defended Sony’s decision to increase software prices to $70 for selected first-party PS5 games and refused to comment on whether God of War Ragnorak will be released for PS4 as well as PS5 next year.