If you’ve owned a PS4 in the last few years, you know about the “copying” phase of downloading games, patches, and hotfixes. You can download a 500 MB update in a few seconds, but the “copying” part takes a very, very long time to set up. This can delay your gameplay by anywhere from ten minutes to an hour.
People thought that when the PS5 came out with its fancy new hyper-custom SSD, copying would no longer be a thing. And yet, I’ve seen it still there in the time I’ve spent using the console, and I’m still not sure why this is still a thing.
PlayStation does this “copying” thing with some downloads because when it gets a new patch, it copies the whole game and adds the patch at the same time to keep the files from getting corrupted. Most of the time, this means that the copying phase takes longer the bigger the game is.
Adding an SSD makes copying go faster, but it doesn’t stop it. I put an SSD in my PS4, which did make it go faster, but copying is still a problem, even with the PS5 and its custom SSD. Sony doesn’t seem to have changed the way it downloads and installs patches, even though the new hard drive makes the process faster. Mark Cerny is said to have pretty much said that the PS5 won’t be able to copy unless his words were misunderstood.
But now we’re here.
Yesterday, I played Destiny 2 as I usually do. I had to download a small hotfix, and then I got to the copying phase. How did it turn out? After downloading for about 15 seconds, it took 23 full minutes to copy and let me play. I have to say that this didn’t feel very “next-gen.”
This could be because Destiny 2 is a PS4 game that hasn’t been “optimized” for PS5, which won’t happen until December. So once that patch comes out, it’s possible that slow copying will be fixed. Maybe, but I don’t think so.
I have also seen the copying phase in games like Astro’s Playroom and Godfall that are made just for the PS5. It’s faster than it was the last generation, but it’s still there. I was hoping that Sony had moved on from this way of patching and updating games since the Xbox doesn’t have “copying” phases for updates. Yes, the Destiny 2 copying phase used to take 45 minutes, but now it only takes 23 minutes, which isn’t great.
Again, this might have something to do with how many games are stuck between the PS4 and the PS5. Once things are only made for the PS5, copying will either stop or be so short that no one will really notice. But for now, I can tell, and I don’t think I’m the only one.
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