Are spinning rust drives still a common enough issue that games need to be
You would think so, but that is actually not the case. The last generation of game consoles (PS4, XBOne) still run HDDs out of the box. Less than half of PCs are running SSDs, especially in the min-spec PC cafes of East…
You would think so, but that is actually not the case. The last generation of game consoles (PS4, XBOne) still run HDDs out of the box. Less than half of PCs are running SSDs, especially in the min-spec PC cafes of East and Southeast Asia. A large chunk of the PCs running SSDs today are still only using a small SSD for their operating system and boot up, not as their primary storage drive. This is also in no small part because the AI industry isn't just gobbling up all the RAM, but they are also buying up storage and driving prices up on all NAND flash memory, which includes SSDs.
Normally, most AAA game development would move target specs this far into a console life cycle. However, due to the world situation and circumstances today, there are still a lot of potential customers who are running old hardware. These players have some money to spend on games, so it makes sense for cost-conscious publishers to serve them.
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