Gaming demands on storage drives have exploded over the past few years, with many AAA games now requiring 100GB of storage or more. The Steam hardware survey for June 2025 has revealed that most Steam gamers only have 100 to 249GB of free storage available to install new games.
23.05% of Steam gamers are in this category; the next highest group boasts 250 to 499 GB of free storage, making up another 22.43% of Steam's free hard drive space user share. The final two groups with double-digit user share are the group that boasts 500GB to 749 GB of free storage and the group that boasts 10 GB to 99 GB of free storage. By contrast, only around 17% of all Steam users have free drive space in the 1TB range or more.
Overall, Steam users have seen a reduction in free storage space since last month's hardware survey. The four aforementioned groups with under 1TB of free space grew by anywhere between 0.04% and 0.24% respectively, compared to the Steam hardware survey in May.
Compounding the issue is that more than 50% of Steam gamers have more than 1TB of total storage space, according to the latest Steam hardware survey. That might sound good, but (combined with the other statistics) most Steam gamers only have a few hundred gigabytes of free storage, even though most gamers have 1TB or more of storage available in their system.
Steam's results continue to highlight the growing challenges gamers face balancing the number of games installed on their rigs while respecting the amount of free space available to them. 100 to 200 GB of free space used to be plenty of space for game installations, but that trend is no longer the case, as AAA titles now regularly consume around 100 GB of storage. Technologies such as DirectStorage are also putting more stress on storage performance in games, making cheap and high-capacity hard drives less and less feasible for game storage (except for game backups).
Fortunately, SSD prices have been dropping, making storage upgrades far more feasible right now to counter this growing issue. The latest Fourth of July sales and ongoing Amazon Prime Day sales have brought ultra-high capacity 4TB M.2 SSDs to strikingly low prices. Samsung's 990 Evo Plus 4TB is a great example, priced at just $234.99 at the time of writing.
If that is still too much, Samsung's 2TB version is 20% off, priced $100 lower than the 4TB model at just $139.99. For more deals, check out our Prime Day tech deals section that is being updated live to keep you up to date on the latest deals happening today.
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