Xbox One Getting Flogged By PlayStation 4 in Install Sizes
Some of the differences between install sizes of games on current-generation consoles are mind-boggling.
Installing games on consoles is just horrible. Gone are the days when playing a newly purchased game for the first time could occur moments after arriving home with it. Now gigabytes of data needs to be transferred to your hard drive (possibly after burning desperate minutes deleting or moving something first), and then likely a patch needs to be downloaded and installed, too. Isn’t avoiding this laborious process why gamers stopped playing on PCs and move to consoles in the first place?
But installs and huge downloads are now a part of the modern gamer lifestyle, and it turns out that Xbox One users need to do a fair bit more of that than their PlayStation 4 counterparts.
Finder.com has published some data comparing the top 20 disparities in install sizes between games on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. So these are games that are multiformat and appear on both machines, yet require different amounts of hard drive space to do so. And the differences are quite staggering. Warframe takes top spot, with a 19.63GB variance between the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. But it’s not alone, with The Elder Scrolls Online at 18.58GB and Alien Isolation at 16.35GB.
These are real differences, which users would experience right now if they were to download both games from their respective stores. Click here for the full list.
What’s more concerning - at least from an Xbox One fan’s perspective – is that only two of the top twenty games are bigger on PlayStation 4. Batman: Arkham Knight (6.07GB) at 15th, and Destiny (5.57GB) at 18th. So what gives? Why is the Xbox One so much more challenging to compress for; or is Microsoft just more lax on what it enforces of its developers?
Considering that these titles are more-or-less identical, some of these disparities just don’t add up.