In years prior there were a lot of games and a shifting understanding of what hardware they can require. While gfx needs changed rapidly, hard drive space requirements went up steadily, predictably. As most of us have long abandoned physical media sales and use digital downloads instead, this number has stopped to be defined by the medium’s capacity.
Before and now we had outliers like MMORPGs and movie-like games requiring more estate, while other games like Deep Rock Galactic needing just 4GBs, but there always was some number of gigabytes you as a consumer thought a new game would take.
Where’s that sweet spot now for you?
For me, it’s 60GB, or a 40-80GB range. Something less or more than that causes questions and assumptions. I have a lot of space, but I’d probably decline if some game would exceed 2x of my norm or 120GB of storage.
Games should be less than 60 GB unless they are massive in scale (BG3) with tons of assets. Even then, they should have an option to not load the highest res textures that are used in less than 4k ultra kinds of settings since the majority of bloat is textures.
But games with a lot less going on and poor optimization are a bane on PC gaming. Helldivers 2 on PC is like 140 GB now while only 35 GB on console because of asset duplication and other poorly optimized PC choices. They really need to get that sorted out.
Currently I don’t have a real limit as I’ve gone all in on massive amounts of drive space explicitly so I can install all the games I want despite only playing two or so at a time. Previously I would really think hard about anything over 50 GB just because updates frequently added another 20+GB to the drive during the upgrade process which would sometimes hit space limits if I wasn’t paying attention.