Xbox Series X will allow users to delete parts of games to free up space

In the age of digital downloads, organizing/freeing up space on one’s gaming console is becoming an increasingly onerous burden. Microsoft aims to alleviate that burden with next generation Xbox Series X and S consoles in a number of ways, including the application of the same USB 3.1 external hard drive used on the Xbox One on the Series X and S, custom expansion cards and an interesting new feature — allowing Xbox gamers to choose specific parts of a game to uninstall in order to free up disk space. The information was revealed in Director of Programming for the Microsoft Xbox Live, Larry Hryb aka Major Nelson’s latest podcast in a portion of the interview with Xbox Series X development producer Jason Ronald.

“Even beyond the hardware, we’ve actually made user interface improvements to make it easier for you to manage your storage,” Ronald said. “As an example, one of the new features we’re adding is actually for, if a title chooses to support it, the ability to selectively uninstall different components of the game.”

Ronald went on to explain with an example of a game containing both single-player and multiplayer facets. “Let’s say you play a campaign as an example, and then you want to focus exclusively on multiplayer. If the developers chose to support it, you can actually uninstall the campaign itself, so that you can be more in control of how you’re actually using your storage, so you really get the most benefit out of the available storage that you have.”

To give an example, let’s say you’ve completed the single-player campaign of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and wanted to use the game only for sporadic multiplayer bouts; with the storage management feature of the Xbox Series consoles, you could then uninstall the single-player data from the game and retain the multiplayer at your discretion in order to better utilize your overall data storage.

Although it’s still unclear how exactly the selective uninstallation will work for games that only contain elements of single-player modes or multiplayer modes respectively, we’re definitely looking forward to the improved level of customization in terms of game storage on the next-gen Xbox Series X and S consoles.

What do you think of the selective uninstallation option for the Xbox Series X and S? Sound off in the comments.