why am i not allowed to just play xbox enhanced games off a external hard drive?

and thats an issue, the storage options atm for the series x and s are limited and the expansion options are both proprietary and EXPENSIVE, i would kinda prefer it if they did do 2 versions of games xbox one and enhanced, there needs to be options in my opinion because of the size increase of games due to well in my opinion lack of effort to optimize and compress game files, like just having the 4 most recent call of duty games will take up the entirety of the internal storage, and a lack of an option to play it off an external drive isn't fun, and the only way to expand the useable storage is to fork over the price of another xbox series x for just 2 extra TBs, and there isn't really an option to expand the internal storage, i just think having the option would be better or just allowing games to run off hard drives whilst informing users of the games being slower would be nice

how long is too slow tho? a millisecond? a couple seconds? i'm fine with slower loading times and longer loading screens if it means i can actually have my games installed, the internal storage is about 800gb then the expansion cards cost from half to the same amount as the console, i'm fine if it means my games will have slower loading times if it means i can go buy a 5 TB hard drive to have modern games on when modern games take up about 100gbs minimum atm, i just wanna know why it isn't optional, like why? its a worse user experience in my opinion

It may be a little bit complicated to understand but it's not just about the games being slower to load. Essentially, Xbox Series X games are coded differently to previous Xbox games that used be loaded on slow mechanical hard drives.

Xbox Series X games have much larger complex textures than those from the previous generation of consoles. External hard drives are made up of a platter of spinning discs with read/write heads, the technology of these drives back to the 1980's.

The Xbox Series X uses its GPU to load textures faster. The console's custom DirectStorage API allows the GPU to directly access the SSD without going through the CPU. This reduces the amount of CPU overhead and allows the GPU to load textures more quickly.

In addition to using its GPU for texture loading, the Xbox Series X also uses its custom hardware decompression blocks (HDBs) to decompress textures on the fly. This further reduces the amount of CPU overhead and allows the GPU to load textures even faster.

As a result of these enhancements, the Xbox Series X can load textures significantly faster than previous consoles. This allows for more detailed textures, smoother gameplay, and shorter loading times.

Because mechanical hard drives are far too slow, the Series can't use it's custom architecture to load games faster.

In addition to these new techniques, Xbox Series X games also use new file formats that are more efficient than the file formats used on previous consoles. This further reduces the amount of data that needs to be stored on the drive and improves the performance of the game.

As a result of these changes, Xbox Series X games cannot run on mechanical hard drives. These drives are simply not fast enough to keep up with the demands of the new games.

so what about external ssd drives? i've heard people aren't able to run series x enhanced games off that either, and if thats the case why not provide versions that don't have these enhancements, give people choice and allow for people to expand their storage without having to move games around constantly

I don't think getting game developers to write in different code to accommodate different storage options is the answer.

Microsoft can simply allow other M.2 storage manufacturers to work. For me, I think XBOX decisions are pushing me to use my PC for gaming as the current storage options of xbox consoles is terrible. I refuse to pay the ridiculous storage costs currently available knowing how cheap it is to buy the same storage for my PC. For E.G the current Xbox series X is $800 AUD + 2 TB expansion $530 totalling $1330. You can get a gaming PC that would be much better than any console and still play xbox games through windows.

Even the specifications on the yet to be released consoles look so low on storage. Simply doesn't make sense for current gaming standards.

how long is too slow tho? a millisecond? a couple seconds? i'm fine with slower loading times and longer loading screens if it means i can actually have my games installed, the internal storage is about 800gb then the expansion cards cost from half to the same amount as the console, i'm fine if it means my games will have slower loading times if it means i can go buy a 5 TB hard drive to have modern games on when modern games take up about 100gbs minimum atm, i just wanna know why it isn't optional, like why? its a worse user experience in my opinion