The Mini SSD card isn’t and might never ever be an officially validated requirement, however it does objective to resolve a genuine issue for portable video gaming systems– the requirement for quick storage that can fill video games at speeds approaching those of an internal SSD, without needing users to take their own systems apart to carry out upgrades.

Why are video games getting so dang huge, anyhow?

A 2023 analysis from TechSpot recommended that video game size had actually increased at a typical rate of approximately 6.3 GB each year in between 2012 and 2023– video games that are available in over 100GB aren’t the standard, however they aren’t tough to discover. A few of that boost originates from enhanced graphics and the higher-resolution textures required to make video games look great on 4K screens and TVs. TechSpot likewise kept in mind that the storage requirements for narrative-heavy, cinematic-heavy video games like The Last of United States Part 1 were being driven simply as much by audio files and assistance for numerous languages.

“In total, nearly 17 GB of storage is needed for [The Last of Us] data unrelated to graphics,” composed author Nick Evanson. “That’s larger than any entire game from our 2010 sample! This pattern was consistent across nearly all the ‘Godzilla-sized’ games we examined—those featuring numerous cinematics, extensive speech, and considerable localization were typically much larger than the rest of the sample in a given year.”

For another popular current example, think about the set up sizes for the Mac variation ofCyberpunk 2077The variation of the video game on Steam, the Epic Games Store, and GOG runs about 92GB. The variation offered for download from Apple’s App Store is a massive 159GB, exclusively due to the fact that it consists of all of the video game’s voiceovers in all of the languages it supports. (This is since of App Store guidelines that need apps to have all possible files consisted of when they’re sent for evaluation.)

It’s clear that there’s a requirement for quick storage upgrades that do not need you to dismantle your console or PC entirely. Whether it’s this brand-new “mini SSD,” a much faster model of microSD Express, or some other as-yet-unknown storage format stays to be seen.