You're talking about 2 games. To give examples of other Nintendo games:

• Donkey Kong Tropical Freeze_ 11.3GB
• Mario Kart 8_ less than 5GB
• Super Mario World 3D_less than 2.5 GB
• Zelda Wind Waker HD_ again less than 2.5 GB

I know that Nintendo games aren't graphical powerhouses, that they look good because mostly because of their art style, but even with that Nintendo knows how to make their games small.

I love the discussion about games going 100 GB... That sounds funny as hell. Must be a bunch of junk coding or something to inflate a game that much. Amazing that the old games barely take up any space compared to recent games. I blame lazy programmers.

Also a 500 GB hard drive?  It wouldnt be SSD then because they are still a little over $200 for a decent 500 GB SSD.  I also wonder if SSD are less reliable than older hard drives.  If a SSD crashes then it is almost impossible to pull the info off the drive.

@bolded:
UC3 is under 30GB. 20GB for updates sounds doubtful, but I can't know as I don't have it.

some of the late gen games on PS3 were around 30GB. With DLC probably up to 40GB, though I think that should be viewed separately.
The same games (in case they weren't exclusive) were much smaller on the 360 for two reasons. Uncompressed (or lesser compressed) audio and the addition of much more languages, whereas the 360 had more regional versions.

And that's basically the point. Devs will use what they get to work with. PS3 multiplat games were bigger because there was enough space on Bluray to fill and not because the PS3 was technically more advanced (as in able to display higher resolution textures) or something like that.
Currently next gen consoles are using 50GB Blu-rays, which are already double layer. As long as there doesn't exist a new standard (BDXL with 100GB or a completely new type of storage media) games will not jump from 40GB now to 200GB within a few years.

Unless one of the manufacturers does a download-only console, in which case the file size is basically limitless.

I've always wondered why Tropical Freeze was so big????

Not even the next consoles from MSoft and Sony will come with an SSD unless they become a lot cheaper than now. It doesn't make sense, economically speaking.

Also SSD are more reliable than HDD simply because they don't have mechanical/moving parts that can broke.

But you only wanted one game to be more than 50GB, so how does listing others that are far below 50GB help your point?

Actually looking at Tropical Freeze you have to admit that this is quite a lot, considering WiiU isn't that much above the 360, where the maximum available amount on a disc used to be 6.8GB (2005-2011) until they started to up that limit by 1GB and started using 2 discs for several games.

There is still room for increased file sizes in this gen and certainly even more next gen.

Well, what I meant was that Nintendo developed games tend to be really small compared with what you can find on other consoles/developers and I was also talking in general, not about one game in particular. Let me put it in another way: I doubt we'll see Nintendo to publish games that weight as much as other comparable games from their competitors.

Also, the WiiU and 360 comparison is not a good one because the 360's basic model didn't had an HDD and Microsoft didn't allow retail game installs until very late in the gen unlike WiiU where retail game installs have been present since day one. Althought I agree that Tropical Freeze is really big, it doesn't fit in a 8 GB WiiU basic model!

I don't see the point you're trying to make here.
Downloading retail games on 360 wasn't really a thing in the first few years, mostly because there were none or only very few available. Therefore having an HDD or not wasn't really an issue.
Developers were only limited by the double layer DVD and not because of the tiny, if any, amount available on early 360 HDDs.
I also don't see how optional game installs have anything to do with the topic at hand. If they were mandatory like some of the PS3 ones or X1 and PS4, then sure.

I was just trying to say that for all early to mid 360 games, the 6.8GB limit of a DL-DVD was enough (with exceptions such as Blue Dragon or Lost Odyssey).
Then suddenly they increased the usable limit by 1GB which only helped a tiny bit, as developers had to use 2 discs for nearly every bigger game starting with  Mass Effect 2 (or something like that).
WiiU games still have room to grow and I don't think that the ~3-5GB of Mario3DWorld and MK8 are the average size when Nintendo brings their last games to WiiU.

My point is that the games developed by Nintendo tend to be small, and therefore a 500GB HDD would be enough for Nintendo's next home console since we would be able to have 15-20 games on it at the same time, unlike what happens on the PS4/X1 where those 500GB feel small because its games take 40 or 50GB of storage. It's the advantage of the problem of not having 3rd party support.

Also, since WiiU doesn't use DVD but a BD variant with 25GB of storage, their games aren't affected by size limits as the early 360 games were. And comparing the games available on the early years of the PS360 era to the early WiiU games is pointless; WiiU games are nowhere near those early HD efforts but more like mid-to-last gen games.

But early 360 games weren't really affected by the disc size limit. That happened a few years later when devs had no choice but to use a 2nd or 3rd disc. But the majority of the latest games still only need one disc.

@bolded
Exactly and I never said otherwise. Tropical Freeze is 11GB. There are only a handful (okay maybe two handful) of 360 games that are that big. So Nintendo already does games that are as big as the biggest from last gen (at least compared to 360). Bayonetta WiiU being even bigger than that.
So when WiiU games are comparable to late 7th gen efforts, why does it sound so obscure that WiiU2 games are comparable to PS4/X1 or even beyond levels?