Well, they will. Two things drive the trend, in my view:
Lack of informed opinions. If you don’t know that other options exist, you’ll buy whatever because you think it is the baseline.
Convenience. This one is a killer. People regularly give up a lot – even rights – in the name of convenience.
Between those two factors, it’s a hard sell for the average consumer to not support this kind of corpo garbage. A nihilistic view, maybe, but I think it’s an accurate one.
In a similar vein, it’s pretty easy to show someone that consoles have these needlessly expensive proprietary links, plus games which are very expensive for the same reason. But it is very hard to convince someone that the cool thing they saw on TV isn’t, in fact, “cool” because of the aforementioned reasons. And ultimately, people like having cool things, even if that coolness is subjective.
Historically, it’s been a push-pull between groups, but everyone has had a different future. Now that things are being consolidated wholesale – e.g. physical media going out the window because so many are happy to stream and never own anything – it is more necessary than ever to call out #1 and #2, since the market itself is changing for the worse.
Weird, I have a regular old 2TB (or maybe it was 1?) western digital plugged into the USB on the back of my series x and it works fine, not sure I understand the need to spend a bunch on something like this.
Edit: and before responding about speed… I haven’t noticed much, if any, difference in game performance from installing on the drive or external outside of the initial game loading (startup) time, so not sure if that’s the only benefit to using the expansion slot.
Hmm I’ll have to check this later as I don’t remember ever running into that problem since my Xbox internal has been full for a while. But I also wonder if that applies to physical copies or not since all my series x games are physical. Unless Xbox does this automatically in the background without user intervention, then I may have not noticed
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
Sub for any gaming related content!
Rules:
1: No spam or advertising. This basically means no linking to your own content on blogs, YouTube, Twitch, etc.
2: No bigotry or gatekeeping. This should be obvious, but neither of those things will be tolerated. This goes for linked content too; if the site has some heavy “anti-woke” energy, you probably shouldn’t be posting it here.
3: No untagged game spoilers. If the game was recently released or not released at all yet, use the Spoiler tag (the little ⚠️ button) in the body text, and avoid typing spoilers in the title. It should also be avoided to openly talk about major story spoilers, even in old games.
The fact that consoles still get away with this inflated proprietary crap is shocking
What are we going to do if consumers still buy that stuff?
Well, they will. Two things drive the trend, in my view:
Lack of informed opinions. If you don’t know that other options exist, you’ll buy whatever because you think it is the baseline.
Convenience. This one is a killer. People regularly give up a lot – even rights – in the name of convenience.
Between those two factors, it’s a hard sell for the average consumer to not support this kind of corpo garbage. A nihilistic view, maybe, but I think it’s an accurate one.
In a similar vein, it’s pretty easy to show someone that consoles have these needlessly expensive proprietary links, plus games which are very expensive for the same reason. But it is very hard to convince someone that the cool thing they saw on TV isn’t, in fact, “cool” because of the aforementioned reasons. And ultimately, people like having cool things, even if that coolness is subjective.
Historically, it’s been a push-pull between groups, but everyone has had a different future. Now that things are being consolidated wholesale – e.g. physical media going out the window because so many are happy to stream and never own anything – it is more necessary than ever to call out #1 and #2, since the market itself is changing for the worse.
Well, not ALL consoles. The PS5 uses a standard SSD slot. Pretty easy to get at too. Easier than the Steam Deck.
https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/hardware/ps5-install-m2-ssd/
Probably harder making sure you get the “right” ssd than actually installing it.
“Easier than the Steam Deck” Probably because the PS5 is not a Portable device
Weird, I have a regular old 2TB (or maybe it was 1?) western digital plugged into the USB on the back of my series x and it works fine, not sure I understand the need to spend a bunch on something like this. Edit: and before responding about speed… I haven’t noticed much, if any, difference in game performance from installing on the drive or external outside of the initial game loading (startup) time, so not sure if that’s the only benefit to using the expansion slot.
USB drives are good for storage only, you can’t actually play the games from there. You have to move them to the SSD to play them.
Hmm I’ll have to check this later as I don’t remember ever running into that problem since my Xbox internal has been full for a while. But I also wonder if that applies to physical copies or not since all my series x games are physical. Unless Xbox does this automatically in the background without user intervention, then I may have not noticed
Yes, series X and S games can’t be played from external storage. You have to move them to the SSD.
Where you might be being tricked is that it WILL work for OLDER games, so if you’re using it for backwards compatible versions, it will work fine.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/xbox/forum/all/whats-the-point-of-selling-external-hard-drives/dc0c20dc-0c00-4f32-9aa6-b9b194a3e90c
https://www.seagate.com/support/kb/using-an-external-usb-drive-with-an-xbox-series-x-or-s/
Why not use non proprietary
Sure, you can swap out the internal SSD, it’s a 40 step process to just get to it:
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Xbox+Series+X+SSD+Replacement/141752
It is intentionally difficult, of course.
The real solution is not to buy the console.
Idk id do 40 steps to save that kind of money