Last year, Saber reported on just how much space the games of the day would take up if you chose to install them onto the hard drive of your Xbox 360.  Yesterday, I sat down to check out the PSN's new video download service when it crossed my mind that perhaps I should check out how much space I have left on my PS3's hard drive.  It's the 80GB model and while I was sad to see my former 60GB unit (with the PS2 backward compatibility) leave with my ex, I was quite pleased that I was getting an extra twenty gigs out of it, not to mention free reign of the bed.  So I looked under system settings, system information and to my slight horror, saw that I had a mere 14GB left.  I mean, okay, it's still a lot of space, but I'm a man with two-and-a-half terabytes spread across two PCs.  To me, 14GB is worryingly low.

Gigabytes are shrinking, people.  They're being eaten up by our happy disposition towards making our consoles the all-singing, all-dancing, all-in-one, all-things-to-all-people, all-encompassing, catch-all, be-all-and-end-all, all-powerful entertainment centre they all want us all to unswervingly always use.  We have our movies, our photos and our music on there and that's fine because you've got that hard drive that allows you to do that.  I have not put 60GB (the capacity of the PS3 hard disc drive (HDD), less its operating system is around 74GB) of music, pictures and video on my HDD.  Far from it.  So where have my gigabytes gone?  Did monsters eat it over Hallowe'en?  Have they leaked onto the floor and fallen prey to the UFO Towers cats, Scamp and Poppet?  Are they like dairy produce; do they expire when left unused or out of the fridge?  No.  They've been kidnapped and held hostage by lazy games developers.

Like that one, probably.  We've spoken about patching before, and we've spoken about installing games when you choose to, but sneaking onto our hard drives whenever we buy a game, so that we don't get pissed off the the noise of our media reader, or the time it takes to load up, developers are littering our much-needed hard drive space with bandages and plasters, splints and tourniquets that heal the wounds that they should have seen to before sending their game out to war.  While it says on the back of the box how much hard drive space it will use up, us long-standing gamers just consider it a simple matter of putting the disc in, it gets read all the while you're playing it, then when you eject the disc, all you're left with is your saved games.

I understand the necessity for GTA IV's 3.3GB install and Oblivion's 4.4GB game files.  These games load as you go along, but does that mean you can't play them on, say, the Xbox 360 Arcade, with its 512MB memory unit?  And if you forget about it and don't play Star Wars: The Force Unleashed any more, its 2.9GB install will remain on your HDD for ever.  Plus its 1.9GB patch.  Just to say, a 1.9GB patch?!  I'm not going to play Sacred 2 again, so I must remember to remove its 4GBs, or Burnout Paradise's 1GB patch. 

I guarantee that for most people this won't be a problem until one day, they insert GTA V into their drives and it goes to install 7GB of data and says, "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."  Feverish, blinded by emotional distress, people just won't know what to do; there'll be rioting in the streets, broken bottles crashing in waves on the pavements, fires burning behind net curtains and crazed citizens running headlong into the flames and all this because developers ditched the traditional approach of optimising games to run from discs and getting them right before they release them in deference to the 'mañana' approach of installation and patching.  The wind has changed and there's nothing we can do about it other than to be aware of the monstrous appetite of the newer games and make sure there's enough to go around.