Level Up: The PS5 and Xbox Series X/S are awesome, but they share a key flaw

The PS5, Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S reviews are finally in and as expected, all three new consoles are amazing pieces of kit that truly justify their next-generation titles.

But, for me there’s a fly in the ointment, one that’s reared its ugly head numerous times, affecting everything from mobile phones to laptops and desktop computers. I speak of course of storage capacity.

This problem is most pronounced on the Xbox Series S, which has just about enough storage space for 2-3 blockbuster games without expanding the vanilla drive. But it’s actually an issue on all three games consoles.

The fact is, when mainstream games like Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War are set to take up in excess of 130GB of space, it’s clear the storage solutions on all three consoles are going to struggle in the months to come.

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Sadly, the act of upgrading your SSD storage on any of the new consoles will be an expensive affair, purely because the technology itself is still so costly to produce. This has been a well-known problem in the world of PC gaming for some time, with frequent shortages rearing their ugly head, and the sheer cost of making the components being a key metric that can drive up any build’s cost.

Forget M.2 drives, a 1TB Samsung EVO SATA solution will still set you back over £100, and they’re far from cutting edge like the parts seen in the new consoles. The custom parts inside, and incredibly high spec requirements for external drives needed to let them actually run games on the new consoles, exacerbates this problem.

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The difficulty making drives to the correct standard is a key reason there’s only one confirmed external SSD that’ll be compatible with the PS5 and that won’t be available, or ready, at launch. It’s a similar story for Microsoft’s consoles, which is particularly problematic on the Series S.

This means, like PC gamers before them, most PS5 and Xbox Series owners will quickly find themselves in a dilemma, needing to either regularly delete and download games, or invest a lot of scratch in an external storage upgrade, that in the Series S case, could cost nearly as much as the console itself.

In my mind, unless you have a seriously expensive gaming PC, the added perks the new generation brings makes this compromise worthwhile. Trust me, ray tracing and 120fps performance will fundamentally change the way you game. But it’s still an annoyance and one I sadly can’t see either company solving without radically bumping up the new consoles’ price.