Need more space on your PS4 hard drive for those massive AAA games? We don’t blame you: while many games take up a paltry amount of space, the standard 500GB size of a PS4 hard drive – or even the larger 1TB standard of the PS4 Pro – can quickly get eaten up when you start downloading en masse, or just from the natural accumulation of games over a console’s lifespan.
That’s not to mention the comparatively huge size of today’s flagship games, with the likes of Red Dead Redemption 2, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019), or the incoming The Last of Us 2 each expected to take up more than 100GB of space. Three or four of those titles can end up cramming everything else out of your hard drive, and you’ll naturally want to know what you can do to fit in all your games.
Well, look no further. In this handy guide, we’ll run you through the process of deleting old PS4 games to make space for new ones, and how to expand your storage to avoid deleting anything at all.
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How to delete PS4 games from your hard drive
Deleting PS4 games from your hard drive is, thankfully, pretty easy – if you know where to look.
The first thing to do is boot up your PS4 and log into your respective user profile (if that doesn’t happen automatically). You can head straight into your Library in the PS4 menu and delete games individually there – by hovering over the game icon and pressing Options on your PS4 controller and then Delete in the submenu that pops up.
The better avenue, though, is heading to Settings on the far right of the PS4 home screen, and selecting Storage > Applications. In there, you’ll find each game listed with its relative size, making it very easy to clock which games are hoovering up all your space – and ensuring you won’t need to delete several fun games if there’s one culprit taking up 100GB you can remove. You go through the same method of pressing Options on your PS4 controller, and then Delete in the submenu.
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Do I have to buy these PS4 games again?
No. Any PS4 game you’ve bought digitally, downloaded through PS Plus, or installed on your console using a retail disc can be re-installed without having to purchase it all over again.
For any downloaded games, you can head to your Library and re-download them in the Purchased games menu by pressing with X and selecting Download.
Does that delete my precious, precious save files?
Again, no. Save files are stored separately from game installs, and take up a fraction of the space anyway.
When deleting any PS4 game, you’ll be prompted to say whether you want to include save data in that, and we recommend saying ‘No’ to ensure you can pick up where you left off if you ever re-download the game.
I want to keep my PS4 games!
Don’t want to delete all those precious games? If you’re the kind of gamer who likes to pick up and play a different game every weekend, it may not be practical to have yourself deleting and installing the same games over and over again to facilitate this. That’s why getting a second hard drive may be the way forward.
Check out our guide to upgrading your PS4 hard drive, or check out our top picks of external PS4 hard drives below:
Will it work the same way with PS5?
From what we know of the PS5 console, storage will work a little bit differently.
We know the console will feature an SSD (solid state drive), which should make for more reliable performance and faster load times, as well as greater control over what you actually download for individual games.
Developers will be able to parcel up campaigns and multiplayer modes into separate install files, for instance, meaning that if you’re only interested in single-play narratives – or gunning down other players online – you won’t need to clog up your hard drive with files you won’t end up using.
File compression is set to be a lot more efficient, too, though that may be counteracted by the greater number of in-game assets, textures, and the like for PS5 games.
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