Well the top 3 users of storage space in games are in no particular order:
- Full motion video
- Sound
- Textures
Full motion video is being transitioned away from due to the flexibility, time and money savings of doing everything in-engine. So you could probably erase this one in the future as engines and performance improves.
Sound and Textures aren't an easy one to get around. They are both already highly compressed and its difficult to use less of it depending what type of game being made. Mass Effect for example has a few dozen hours of recorded voice and other sound effects. I have also not seen much progress being made in terms of synthesisation of textures, however the compression of textures has improved over the years. The Xbox 360 has I believe a 10:1 texture compression ratio and the PS2 only had a 6:1 ratio, which means that 30GB of uncompressed textures take up 3GB on the Xbox 360 and 5GB on the PS2. Sound compression is a losing battle unfortunately.
So what does this mean? Most games even in the next generation will not require more than perhaps 6-8GB of space for conventional games. WRPGs more so than JRPGs will require more space as they have a lot of voice acting which they must store on disc.
Tease.
