SAN MATEO, Calif. — Sony PlayStation’s Wrap-Up 2023 data reveals that gamers spent 64% of their time managing storage on their PlayStation 4 and 5 consoles.
“2023 was a banner year for Sony Interactive Entertainment and its essential consumers. With many exclusive titles and third-party content, competition was fierce,” said CEO and President Jim Ryan in a press release.
“But the data doesn’t lie – and the data shows, time and time again, that our core base loved maneuvering their data between consoles and hard drives more than anything else. This says a lot for how we’ll approach our 2024.”
Gamers’ online reactions to the data ran the gamut of emotions, from shrugged resignation to frustrated confusion.
“I thought I played a lot of games this year. Spider-Man 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, even just Fortnite,” said PS5 owner Caitlin Sims.
“But when I think about it, I did spend a lot of time figuring out how to make room for all the install files and updates of these games. Hell, I might’ve even deleted Fortnite for Spider-Man. I’m glad there are games on my phone, cause I would play those while I waited for the data transfers to be done.”
Retail employees at game stores also noticed the trend shifting away from playing actual video games toward maximizing storage efficiency.
“During Black Friday, nobody wanted to buy the new Call of Duty or pre-order that Avatar game,” said GameStop assistant manager Joe Teneman.
“All anyone could talk about were the hard drives we had for sale – how HDDs can’t play PS5 games, how you have to install internal drives yourself, how to change your default installation location. I saw a mom literally say, ‘This M.2 2TB SSD will make my son’s Christmas,’” continued Teneman. “That was surreal.”
Nintendo also put out an end-of-year 2023 summary of consumers’ Switch habits, but players need 17 SD cards to access the data.
