PS4 installs have you playing the game in seconds

If you're looking to buy a PS4 when it's released here on the 29th November then you'll be aware that games will have a mandatory install. With as much as 50GB of data on each of those slow spinning Blu-Ray discs, you might be thinking that it'll take a long, long time before you can actually get to play your newly purchased game, but not so. According to one Sony employee, it could be as little as 10 seconds.

This is all thanks to the PlayStation's play-while-you-wait feature, which essentially installs the earliest parts of the game first, letting you get into the menu, look at the controls and begin the earliest levels of the game while the rest of it is cached on your internal hard drive.

Bet that flame texture takes five minutes to install just by itself

This news comes from the mouth of Mark Cerny, system architect for the PS4, who suggested that installed games would stay on the hard drive until the user deleted them – here's hoping saves are stored somewhere else. He also worked on the PlayStation 4 launch title Knack, which is where his 10 second claim comes from. He did say however, that other games may be different and require a slightly longer install time before the player could begin. This is probably due to the fact that Knack is smaller than some titles, coming in at just 37GB. Games like Call of Duty: Ghosts are much larger: more like 49GB.

KitGuru Says: This is a nice change of pace and something I wouldn't mind seeing on the PC too. While download speeds are getting better, if we're looking at getting super-high-res texture packs soon, bringing the average game closer to 50GB than 10, I don't want to wait the few hours it'll take me to download it. 

I'd also need some extra SSD space as one game like that would fill more than half of it.

[Thanks Kotaku]

Become a Patron!