Xbox Game Pass for PC recently dropped a tweet that must be accompanied by shaking heads and a nervous chuckle. A shot of a hard drive partition titled “Games I’ll play someday” and another titled “Games I keep installed but never play” was posted with the question: “Does anyone else’s hard drive look like this?” Oh, the reactions!
Nothing could really be more relatable while being subscribed to a service such as Game Pass and the likes. You get hundreds of games in your hands, and suddenly Storage appears from out of thin air. What does that storage do to show for it? Storing a bunch of games that you downloaded with the full intention of actually playing but just haven’t. Yet. Tomorrow. Next week. Soon.
The replies are a riot. One user DebatableButton shared a screenshot of their own setup, and OMG, 30 terabytes of total space! THIRTY. And it’s still filling up! Another user, Broski, responded, “Holy shit 30 tb total space thats insane,” and yeah, that’s pretty much the appropriate reaction right there.
Next there is Matt, who hasn’t even set up his new hard drive because he broke his back and can’t lay the wires in. Now that’s dedication to the cause! Meanwhile, Souls Alwayson said that they have games they can’t delete because “they shaped me as a person,” which is kinda sweet in a digital hoarder sort of way.
However, nobody is really having much fun about their storage situation. MandolinArt spun a ghost story about how their 1TB SSD fried right before an important trip. All their installed games went POOF. Any gamer could convincingly argue that it’s truly the worst thing to happen to a gamer apart from maybe a house burning down. Okay, that might be worse, but still terrible.
The rest of the thread quickly stopped being really fun as it kept morphing into alternate storage woes and interspersed random bickering about… something? There was some weirdside conversation going on between DeadSerpent666 and TriComStorm__, accusing each other of being a “Russian bot” while making ill-suited mentions of hard drive contents that “would land you in jail.” Haven’t the faintest what that was, but it sure did add some… zest to the chit-chat.
In the meanwhile, BBQ Penguin felt the need to say he just uninstalled “a bunch of sucker punch and Bethesda games so we good now,” to which people started responding about Bethesda. Grummz then jumped in with something about some producer at Bethesda posting a clip from their Indiana Jones game that was taken down after people complained? At that point, the whole situation devolved, but there seems to be some animosity towards Bethesda from certain gamers.
The fully wonderful thing however are the many just… acknowledging this as part of life now. Tony r mentioned the monthly ritual of “mod Skyrim then delete and reinstall next month,” which is both wildly specific and yet massively relatable to so many PC gamers. It’s like we’re all living in one big digital world, forever balancing limited storage space against the unlimited desire to have every game ready at the drop of a hat.
Van Garnett was an outlier, stating they are “monogamous” with games and never really move on until they’ve finished one. Which sounds lovely but probably very alien in today’s never-ending array of new releases and Game Pass adds every other month.
This probably would be the most apt way to express how far apart modern gaming has gone – we have access to more games than ever, but limited hardware to place them on. There’ll always be something bigger to fill it, no matter how big your hard drive is. It’s like The Warehouse Scene from Indiana Jones but instead of Ark of the Covenant, it’s just a bunch of games you downloaded because they were free with Game Pass and looked interesting for approximately five seconds.
In fact, they wouldn’t want it any other way. The struggle is real, but it’s our struggle. The constant juggling act of what to keep installed, what to delete, what to promise yourself that you’ll play next, is all part of gaming in the present. So next time you’re staring down your storage management screen with that one last desperate plea for help as the only option, pray for yourself because nobody is even going to try and save you.
