Because the PS5 SSD does 5GB/s, and that's the kind of speeds new AAA games are going to be built around.

We still have yet to see if that will actually become a standard going forward. Sure there's probably gonna be some fancy games without loading screens doing crazy content-streaming tricks to show of the new console hardware, but in the long-term, studios may decide it's not worth the time and effort compared to just having a loading screen that loads the whole level in a big chunk.

Plus you're gonna be targeting a much wider userbase for the time being by not targeting SSDs.

I think there's the argument that most studios will do whatever's easiest. Only a few will really try to be fancy and use the new hardware to the utmost, right?

So then yeah, sticking with a load screen _might_ be easiest. But if the tooling supports it, it might be even easier to just not worry about loading and having to make a loading screen, and let the engine handle that stuff for you. UE5 at least seems to be going in that direction.

Well, those are PC games, optimized for all sorts of hardware, like spinning rust, where other stuff is happening in the background as well.

A lot of AAA games are built for PC and consoles, that's why you don't normally see much progress in graphics until a new console generation comes out. Current AAA games are also already recommending SSDs, so if people think they're going to have a good experience playing AAA games on an SD card, they're going to be dissapointed.

Oh right, NVMe. I have yet to experience it. Yeah, I suppose if the software is optimized for it, it is a much better experience.

SD cards also have the drawback of having pretty limited write cycles compared to any SSD.

NVMe does next to nothing to PC games (compared to an SSD). Direct Storage (Windows 11) requires a minimum of 1TB.

Being not NVMe is enough to call it slow