360 didn't support full game installs at launch. It didn't have a large enough HDD to support that either. So MS used a partial cache system. If you have the entire game on HDD, there's no need nor advantage in a partial cache. Ergo it makes no sense, and if Sony's engineers are sensible, they'll just copy the game to HDD in its entirety.
Still doesn't make sense. The files on on HDD already. Why copy them again? I suppose they could have an outside edge of the HDD reserved for current game functionality, but then if you're copying stuff across the HDD between install and cache, is it really going to be better off?
It would depend on how many games you play at any one time of course. I'm a digital packrat, I keep virtually my entire steam library (~900GB) installed at all times even though many games I never play at all.
Only if you buy digital copies. It has to be assumed that physical discs are being cached only temporarily and when empty room to save fresh data in runs out, older cached data will get deleted automatically.
Why must that be assumed?
This takes control of what games the owner has to hand out of the owner's hands, and will impact initial quality of experience as the game deletes old content and installs new content. As there's no need to handle that automatically (people aren't that dumb that they can't choose games/apps to uninstall when running out of room), that strikes me as an over-engineered and less effective solution than the obvious.
Because that would be the natural way to do it. Otherwise you'd quickly run into a situation where you can't save a single god damn thing to your console without it nagging you to delete something because you've filled up the HDD with cached disc titles.
...Why do you care?
Look. No matter how you do it, there's gonna be impacts because the HDD isn't infinitely large. Not having to faff with managing data on the HDD which is only ever intended to be throwaway anyway is going to save you time and mental energy. You can't run disc titles without the disc in the console regardless, so why does it matter to you that the temporary cache remains on the drive until you say so?
Coz... I got news for you... Consoles aren't like PCs... Not even when they're loaded to the brim with x86 CPU cores.
In my previous post, I described the situations where I would prefer control. There's no clever cache mechanism that can know what games I want deleted first. Timestamp method will make the wrong decisions very often.
Changing the background and providing themes are not engineering issues. Design and marketing teams might have decided Brand and UI consistency had priority.
