It's no secret that the installed capacity of games has been steadily increasing over the past few years, but next-generation games may need even more storage space to keep up.

The Unreal Engine 5 welcome video demonstrated many of the cool features that will be included when it launches in early 2022. But development tools and stunning vistas like the ones shown here come at a heavy price, and storage is one of the areas that will take the biggest hit. [The UE5 demo sample project "Valley of the Ancient" alone is 100 GB. This does not include the 10GB of the engine itself.

With the ability to directly import assets "made up of millions of polygons, from ZBrush sculpts to photogrammetry scans," and a host of other hyper-intensive features, it's safe to say that the next wave of games will eat deep into precious SSD storage space. It's safe to say that the next wave of games will eat deep into precious SSD storage space.

When Unreal Engine 5 was first announced, we asked our developers what they thought of the engine.

Stephen Kick of Nightdive Studios said, "The only downside I can think of is the exponential increase in game install size.

Brace yourself, either you'll need racks and racks of SSDs or your storage solution will have to catch up pretty quickly.