Do you remember when Planescape: Torment, Unreal Tournament, F.E.A.R., and Need for Speed were captivating enough that you'd happily spend summer days immersed in those games? The original Dark Souls was around 4GB on install, with the remastered edition taking up around 8GB. Today, modern games require 60-100GB of space, catering to the next level of photorealism, vast open worlds and hardware.

What for?

This focus on creating lush realities, it is dwindled by the exponential cost it takes to fix errors well into development, and because of modern unwillingness to take risks (due to the massive financial investment), you're left with staid gameplay which begs you to install the latest DLCs and microtransactions. Or you have the alternative indie games which are essentially pixel-art gimmicks, calculated to hit numbers on Steam/Google Play charts.

When you scale upward just so your game doesn't fall behind with the times, the development problems don't just grow, they balloon to the point where you can't casually adjust things on the fly without spending countless hours/finances hunting unforeseen issues - such that your development team is blind to asking if the game is actually a good experience. It's not the production value, but those little touches and flourishes that developers put when there's enough breathing room to revise things, that truly help make a game come to life.

This is the essential reason why GTA 6 is being delayed to late 2026 (with possible pushbacks), and why gaming - once a promising frontier for hijacking your mind - has now become synonymous with political indoctrination, streamer bait and just overhyped products in general.