The Xbox Series S is a value proposition by Microsoft. This generation the console maker decided to try a different tack and launched two consoles. There was the bigger and beefier Xbox Series X, boasting all the power and capable of 4K and ray tracing, and in its shadow a smaller, cheaper, and less powerful alternative. But the Xbox Series S actually stole some of its bigger sibling's limelight at first. Consumers found the Xbox Series S more readily available and its cheaper price a neat gateway into this current gen. For $300 in the US or £250 in the UK, gamers could play the latest titles with a more powerful CPU and an SSD that granted much faster loading times. However, as this generation has gone on, some players have been finding the Xbox Series S somewhat lacking in certain departments. This is especially notable in the memory department. The Xbox Series S ships with onboard storage of 512GB compared with the Xbox Series X onboard storage of one terabyte. Howeve, in reality, the Xbox Series S offers just 364GB of space usable for games. And with games getting bigger all the time, players are finding they're maxing out the storage very, very easily.
Over on Twitter, noted Xbox enthusiast Stallion observed that he had maxed out the storage on his Xbox Series S with just two games. These happened to be Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War and Destiny 2, with these weighing in at 241.9GB and 111.3GB, respectively. Others have been nodding in recognition, with the limited amount of the space the Series S offers an issue for its owners. However, others did also point to Call of Duty, which is a known offender for taking up a lot of space, while not all games do such a bad job with storage optimisation.
Take Star Wars Jedi: Survivor for example. At launch, the game might've taken up a whopping 147.57GB on the PlayStation 5 and a slightly smaller 139GB on the Xbox Series X, but on the Xbox Series S the game managed to fit into a much more compact 44GB. Clearly, Respawn did some work there to ensure the game didn't hog so much of the storage space on the Series S.
Meanwhile, it's somewhat unfortunate that the proprietary storage cards available to upgrade the Xbox Series consoles happen to be pricier than average. It's not the only issue facing the Xbox Series S as some have reported VRAM issues, although this too could be due to poor optimisation on developers' part. As this generation waxes on, we'll have to see how the Series S fares as games get bigger and bigger.