- Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S will give developers the ability to allow gamers to uninstall specific components of games rather than the entire game in order to save storage space.
- For example, if you are finished with the campaign of a game but want to continue playing the multiplayer, you can keep delete the campaign and keep playing online.
- Developers will be able to choose whether or not this feature is available for their games, so not all games will let you uninstall specific components.
Unlike Sony, Microsoft has been incredibly forthcoming about the Xbox Series X all year long, but there are still a few previously unknown features that the company has been sharing in the weeks since the console was finally revealed. For example, on Friday, Jason Ronald, Director of Program Management at Xbox, appeared on the latest episode of the Xbox Podcast to talk about how Series X and Series S owners will be able to free up storage space.
One of the issues that many gamers ran into this generation was running out of room on their hard drives due to the ballooning size of video games. Some games are over 100GB in size after all of the updates have been downloaded and installed, and as the technology powering those games becomes more advanced, the sizes will continue to grow. Thankfully, all of the new consoles have expandable storage, but it’s going to be incredibly expensive to add space to your Xbox Series X|S or PS5, which is why Microsoft is adding a feature to partially delete games.
“Even beyond the hardware, we’ve actually made user interface improvements to make it easier for you to manage your storage,” Ronald said on the podcast. “As an example, one of the new features we’re adding is actually for, if a title chooses to support it, the ability to selectively uninstall different components of the game. Let’s say you play a campaign, as an example, and then you want to focus exclusively on multiplayer. If the developers chose to support it, you can actually uninstall the campaign itself, so that you can be more in control of how you’re actually using your storage, so you really get the most benefit out of the available storage that you have.”
This is a brilliant plan, and it’s somewhat shocking that we didn’t see it at some point this generation. After all, once you complete the campaign of Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, you might never access it again despite playing the multiplayer component of the game for months to come. Being able to save however many gigabytes that campaign takes up by specifically deleting it from your SSD would be incredibly helpful.
You can watch the entire Xbox Podcast episode below, with the Jason Ronald interview starting at 41:52:
