The PS5 and Xbox Series X were designed to offer high-performance SSDs as the least common denominator that game developers could rely on, so that game devs cou

The PS5 and Xbox Series X were designed to offer high-performance SSDs as the least common denominator that game developers could rely on, so that game devs could start doing things that aren't possible if you still have to allow for the possibility of running off a hard drive. That's still largely forward-looking; most games currently available still aren't designed to do that much IO—but the consoles will treat all new games as if they really rely on that expectation of high performance IO, and that means running them only from the NVMe storage.