With most modern gen games using around 30-50 gb of space without counting patchs or expansions, I started thinking about a decade ago. When my father bought our first computer, it had a 10 gb hard drive, and we thought we would never fill that beast. Now I can get that capacity in SD cards smaller than a nail. It's crazy how technology evolves. With all this said, when do you think games will start to reach the terabyte? A decade seems too much, maybe two?

Games have come along way, but I think we're reaching a tipping point. Unless you program very badly I can imagine the day when size begins to wind down as growth of style eventually outpace growth of game complexity.

It really won't be that long. The thing that makes a game huge is not the code or logic it is the art work and video sequences. As we move to 4k or even 8k resolution you suddenly jump to more than 100GB just for a 2 hour movie.

The other thing is that storage capacity has been plateauing over the past few years as it gets harder and harder to squeeze more data in. In the 90's the cost per bit was halving yearly, now it's taking 2-3 years to halve. We've just got to 8 tb hard drives when we hit 1 tb in 2006. Performance has improved even slower, and while ssd's give the needed performance, the growth of storage density there is slowing a similar amount. By the time storage gets large and fast enough to handle 1 tb games I suspect streaming games will be the way people play and the storage of game data will be irrelevant.  

it depends on how bad the devs are at compressing the content

When will we reach the Y2K of compression?

Hopefully compression technology moves forward along with everything else.

FF16 will be the first... harr harr

I don't know, but it won't be this generation. Maybe already next gen we will gradually get even faster internet and cheap huge disc drives.

I once read somewhere they needed to ship each Hobbit movie on 1TB hardrives because there was no other way to get a file of it's size to theatres O.O ...

4k is 4 times the size of 1080p, once you move to 8k it is 16 times the size. yeah for the HFR version of hobbit it was huge. farely common practise now to have to ship movies to cinemas on harddrives.

Maybe on the next consoles? IDK. It's mostly textures and video that will take up the space though...