Diablo 4's stash is not bigger because of the hit to performance it would cause
Performance concerns are preventing Blizzard from expanding your stash in Diablo 4.
One of the many, many problems Diablo 4 has been having since launch is the lack of some obvious quality of life and expected convenience features. There's no group finder, any way to favourite/lock items, no ability to search or filter and a lot more.
But perhaps one issue that is the most prevalent is just how limited the stash space is. Even the player inventory itself can quickly get clogged up with items that aren't gear or weapons. The new Season of the Malignant introduced what are basically super gems, yet another type of item that makes your inventory feel ever smaller.
When you want to offload stuff at your stash in towns, you're met with limited options. You start off with a single stash tab, and can purchase three others for a total of four. While Blizzard is adding one extra stash tab in the game's next patch, many wonder just why can't we buy more?
The answer has to do with the performance overhead, as explained by Diablo 4 associate game director Joseph Piepiora. The lead developer responded to a Twitter comment lamenting that we're only getting one extra stash tab.
"When we say they are expensive what we mean is that they create a lot of memory overhead," said Piepiora.
"When you see another player in game you load them and their entire stash filled with all their items. This is what teams are working diligently to improve so that we can have more asap."
"Basically this isn’t a storage concern it’s a performance concern," he added.
It's not clear why the game needs to load every player's stash when you come across them, but perhaps that's the main reason behind this limitation. It's also worth keeping in mind that Diablo 4 is a cross-gen game, so every change has to work on everything from the lowest end (PS4/Xbox One) all the way up to powerful PCs.
So while PC players may be able to throw money at the problem, console players are limited to the memory built into their systems. More than expanding the stash space itself, however, we hope Blizzard has more practical options in the works.