A Warning About The Xbox Series S

Xbox Series X+S

Credit: Microsoft

Today, all eyes are on the Xbox Series X. This is launch time for new consoles, after all, traditionally the territory of enthusiasts less interested in bargain hunting and more interested in grabbing the most powerful hardware as soon as possible. But even though Microsoft is launching a console for those people today—the Xbox Series X—it’s also launching another, cheaper console that will likely become a bigger part of the conversation as we begin moving out of the launch window and solidly into the next generation. And that would be the Xbox Series S.

The Xbox Series S is a $299 console that aims to pick up the lower, more casual end of the market, and it’s on sale today. It’s also all-digital: disc drives cost money, after all. And while it’s a solid option for someone that wants to buy into next-gen gaming but isn’t as concerned about 4K visuals, it comes with a major caveat, and that’s storage space.

The Xbox Series X comes with a meager 364GB of usable space on the hard drive—the drive itself is 512GB, but the OS takes up space. This would be an issue under any circumstances given the size of modern games—Call of Duty: Black Ops: Cold War takes up 136GB on its own—but it’s an even bigger issue considering that this is an all-digital console, and you won’t be storing any of your games on discs. If you’ve got a data cap, you could run into real problems where you can’t take much advantage of your new machine.

This can be ameliorated by external storage, of course, but that starts to cut into the Xbox Series S’s main advantage, which is price. Things start to get more expensive when you start to upgrade the storage, and at a certain point it might just make more sense to buy a console with better storage and more horsepower to boot.

If you’re the sort that only plays a couple of games, this might be fine. If you’re just buying this for Call of Duty and not much more, go for it, I suppose. But if you’re looking into buying one of these to save money, know that storage space is going to both cause a lot of headaches and potentially compromise that value proposition.