And that game is a prime example of how "SSD required" will often just be slapped onto games in order to deny responsibility for bad optimization. Shadow Gambit runs perfectly fine on an HDD except for one thing: launching it takes friggin' forever (well, and the later load times for individual levels aren't great either). The SSD requirement means, though, that in theory the developers don't have to do anything about this issue - the users are to blame since the requirements clearly state that you need an SSD.

To be clear, though: I'm sure that Mimimi isn't just being lazy or significantly at fault here. I've seen too many Unity games that suffer from abysmal load times and I'm pretty sure that the engine just isn't keeping up with the amount of data in modern games and it seems to take a crazy amount of effort to optimize load times there. Meanwhile much more demanding games running on Unreal are doing just fine on HDDs.

Let's check. I'll pick Jimms 'cause that's my go-to store for computer parts.

Cheapest 1TB 3.5" HDD 29.90 eur https://www.jimms.fi/fi/Product/Show/153156/843266-b21/hp-enterprise-1tb-entry-kiintolevy-3-5-sata-7200rpm or 41.90 for a more mainstream choice https://www.jimms.fi/fi/Product/Show/74599/wd10ezex/western-digital-1tb-wd-blue-3-5-sata-iii-7200rpm-64mb

Cheapest 1TB 2.5" SATA SSD 44.90 eur (and not in stock, if you want something that is in stock, it'll be a few EUR more) https://www.jimms.fi/fi/Product/Show/182677/ssd7cs900-1tb-rb/pny-1tb-cs900-2-5-ssd-levy-tlc-sata-iii-535-515-mb-s

Cheapest 1TB M.2 SSD 50.90 eur https://www.jimms.fi/fi/Product/Show/184501/snv2s-1000g/kingston-1tb-nv2-pcie-4-0-nvme-ssd-levy-m-2-2280-3500-2100-mb-s

So that claim doesn't seem to hold.

And 1TB is not much these days, with some games exceeding 100 gigabytes now and everything else just constantly bloating up.

Even if you had 1TB SSD, you'd probably want that for the OS disk.. and then if you need bulk storage, HDD are massively cheaper. If you're playing these big games, you can have your OS and a handful of games installed and then you're out of space :/

It's just that the sweet spot for HDDs is at a much larger capacity now. Compare e.g. 4TB SSD vs 4TB HDD. You can get 4TB HDD for less than 90 eur, but the cheapest 4TB SSD is around 230 eur. And HDDs advantage just gets bigger at 8TB.

8TB HDD 145.90 eur https://www.jimms.fi/fi/Product/Show/176805/st8000dm004/seagate-8tb-barracuda-sisainen-3-5-kiintolevy-sata-iii-256mb

8TB SSD 439.90 eur https://www.jimms.fi/fi/Product/Show/163461/mz-77q8t0bw/samsung-8tb-870-qvo-2-5-ssd-levy-sata-iii-mlc-560-530-mb-s

Think the issue is games will work fine on HDD, even when it's saying SSD is requirement.

Yes - I mean, there's no reason why the games won't load. Eventually.

The most noticeable thing will be the significantly longer loading times: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2Q00LPZkcU

I suspect that removing HDDs from the minimum system requirements is all because it's a waste of developer resources to test on HDDs and they don't want to have to either optimise (which may not be possible for larger texture resolutions) and deal with people complaining about streaming delays and loading stutter.

They will probably work. "Fine", perhaps not so much. Just like with CPU requirements, where they're not generally hard-coding CPU checks, but if you run with a CPU below requirements don't expect a great experience.

Maybe, depends if they use DirectStorage (which also means not just SSD, but specifically NVMe SSD, no SATA). I don't think any current games do, yet.

You know in a RAID configuration with more than 2 HDD it will outperform SATA SSD.
Would be a very stupid move by the developers to not allow the game to be played on HDD.

Starfield.

Expect more of this...as dev's likely will test old HDD's less and there's also tons of data & textures to be processed and loaded.

And modern newer consoles literally come with SSD's (XSX and PS5) - so that changes the game, too...as those hardware become bare min's on PC.

And expect PC requirements to be very stiff, as we get less PS4/X1 games built around that ancient hardware and likely will in power similar or greater than XSX/PS5, which is what we're seeing now with games wanting 6-8gb VRAM minimum (see upcoming Silent Hill 2 Remake and Starfield) and likely will utilizing more VRAM (go look at The Last of Us Part 1, which can use up to 12gb VRAM).

And I don't think NVidia skimping on VRAM and charging the moon for GPU's is helping matters here either.

It's only gonna get worse.

I'm say stick whatever games you play now and those w/ big updates on the SSD. The SSD's fast and gonna do all the data downloading for updates a lot faster.

I had to move CP 2077 away from HDD b/c updates were taking forever on a HDD, yet took no time on SSD.

Plus, load times and textures are gonna load quicker with the SSD. Pretty much, load times in something like The Outer Worlds: Spacer's Choice and The Evil Within 2 are pretty much gone w/ a SSD.

On transfer speed, not seek times

However PCIe/M.2 SSD decimate SATA transfer and seek speeds

As for the OP

The vast size of games now is down to textures

BG3 is 70Gig, I'd say over 60G of that is just pretty pixels and only so much of that can be held in the video cards memory. You've got to find and load up textures from the storage device as quickly as possible.

As for "Optimisation", thats down to loading textures long before they're needed, effective requires devs to say "this 4Gig of textures are being used for this zone, and we're ONLY using these 4gig"

Well, there are a few possibilities:
If the levels are small, you will simply have much longer loading times.
If the game is open world, entering new areas will either cause the game to stutter, or there will be a lot of pop-in.
If there is a fast travel mechanic (I'm talking horses, not teleport), the speed of the horse may be reduced. Assassin's Creed Brotherhood used to do this for HDDs.

Also you can buy a 512GB SSD for 2/5 of what the game costs. What's with this SSD opposition? Maybe if game companies dropped support for SATA SSDs tomorrow, it would become problematic, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.

I would guess it will launch and run on a HDD but just have tons of technical issues like long freezes as it moves files around.

Not mocking you but SSDs are old tech now, you can't run Baldur's Gate 3 on Windows XP either. Things move on, advance... that's how PC gaming works. It's probably well past time for SSDs to be required.

it means the game doesn't work to a min standard without a ssd

Disk Management has some pretty annoying limitations, but it certainly allows creating multiple partitions to SSDs.

It actually does hold quite well if one cares about the warranty, as even a 1TB Samsung 870 EVO is currently 15€ cheaper on Jimm's than the cheapest 1TB HDD with 5 year warranty.

Also just recently I had to look upgrade candidates for a family friend's 500 GB SSD and 500 GB HDD and we ended up buying just one 4TB SSD because not only any HDD with good enough TB/€ ratio would have been more expensive than that, by the time that SSD runs out of space, we hope that 2.5" external backup drives are all SSD based and likely have greater capacity than where their HDD counterparts have gotten stuck for while now.

Damn, at first I thought 'is this serious???' but now i understand. I'm the one with the wrong idea here. Thanks for clarifying y'all... (unintentionally)

I think it's just a suggestion, it'd probably start on an HDD, although maybe it wouldn't perform as well/