Image credit: S-Game

We're not in a very cheap era for PC parts. A ( possibly manufactured! ) GPU shortage making cards that can actually run modern games near-inaccessible to the vast majority of people, combined with RAM and SSDs just generally being horrifically expensive due to demand for their use in data centers , is making contemporary games with high performance requirements very difficult for some people to justify even trying to run, let alone buy. S-Game's recent reveal of wuxia action game Phantom Blade Zero 's preload guide and system requirements has brought this to mind, alongside bringing tears to my eyes, as the game requires not only an SSD to run at all, and 145GB to install, but 300GB of free space to pre-load .

Genuinely, what are we doing here. The guide states that this is because "temporary files and the complete game must coexist during the unlock process", and that "once the process is complete, storage usage will drop to approximately 145GB." Oh, sure, just a small install then.…