With the increasing size in games, both Sony and Microsoft added support for external HDDs last gen. This allowed you to store and play games from that HDD, effectively increasing the capacity of your console up to 8TB, excluding whatever the internal storage capacity was.
With the advent of current gen and games suddenly ballooning in size to over 200GB, I’m giving you the stink eye, Call of Duty, both consoles advertised that they would support external HDDs. However, only MS’ Xbox Series consoles did so from launch day with Sony promising that the PS5 would gain that functionality “soon” via a firmware update.
Well, soon is now as with the roll out of the first major update for the console releasing on 14 April, the console will support storing PS5 games on the external HDD. Note that this is storage only, as the PS5 requires games to be installed on the internal SSD or the as yet still disabled expansion SSD slot for you to play them. While this is not exactly what we want, given that the usable storage on the PS5 is around 667GB, it is something that allows us to take games we do not want to redownload, but are not playing right now and store them on the external HDD.
That is the headline, but the update brings more to the table. One of the system’s innovations is the Share Play feature, allowing players to share their screen with friends in Party Chat. This social aspect of gaming, watching your friend play, was lost as more and more gamers moved to online instead of in person gaming. With this update, your friends still waiting to secure a PS5 can see what the fuss is all about by joining your party on their PS4. Even better, the update allows you to virtually share your game with your friend meaning they can try it out themselves. I think that this works via the PS5 to PS4 streaming app, but however they have managed it, it is a cool way to get more people to experience the PS5.
The PS Blog linked above has all the details on these features and more, including changes to the mobile PS App.
