Consoles until the 7th gen couldn't download full games digitally, so that comparison is moot. And I'm pretty sure people complained back when the PS3 and 360 launched with a model with 20gb storage model, same with both models of the WiiU, and with the 32Gb of internal storage of the Switch. Publishers and platform holders desperately want a digital only future, but by doing so they are burdening us with all of the costs they can get rid off themselves. This is not something that benefits the consumer if they keep needing to buy extra hardware to simply have the game.

And the bolded is exactly what is wrong with what you are saying and/or with posters on forums. 

THE CONSUMER DOES NOT NEED TO BUY EXTRA HARDWARE SIMPLY TO HAVE THE GAME.

That is a flat out lie. So are they to provide an infinite amount of storage space? Doesn't doing that make the console even more expensive for the consumer? They provide enough storage space for you to have 10 - 20 games stored on our system. If you want to store more, then just delete shit that you had there before, its not like so doing means its gone forever. 

You are making it sound like they are supposed to give you 2TB or 4TB of storage space. Like come on. If you find that you ever have to sensationalize something to make your point? then that should tell you that the point o are making is wrong to begin with. 

What you are really saying here is, "the storage they provide will only allow the consumer store 1 - 20 games before they have to start deleting older games to store new ones' as opposed to "this is bad for the consumer because they have to buy extra hardware to have more games". Doesn't have the same ring to it, does it?

My point is... it's not the end of the world. If you are buying physical, your "library" is your physical games, and you just install or delete what you as you go. If (like me) you are digital only you can just do a lot of housekeeping, or go the cold storage route. Spend like $50+ for 2TB worth of storage that you can use as a backup for games you aren't playing that much as it would b faster getting them from there than from the internet.

I just feel this I one of those things that only get made into a big deal on forums. I have NEVER met anyone outside of forums complain about how much space they have left in their console. And for those at do, there area ton of options.

My Xbox 360 has 2.5 terabytes of storage... I can't imagine 3 terabytes (1+2) being enough for an entire console generation.
My Xbox One X has 20 Terabytes and is at 70%.

I mean. Don't get me wrong, your approach is the one I will be taking anyway... And I am definitely the exception rather than the rule with my expansive game libraries.

Definitely going to be more common in enthusiast circles (I.E. Gaming forums) that tend to hoard video games more often.

I understand that. I totally do, but I also expect that those same enthusiasts would know more than any other why things are like that. How much would either o these next-gen consoles cost if they cam with 2TB SSDs? Or would they rather sony and MS totally forwent the SSDs and just put in 2TB HDDs in there? If you recall, back in 2018, I was saying that next get consoles would come with SSDs, that by 2020, they would be able to fit one in there. A lot of people said it wouldn't be a possible cause of the costs, one of the discussed alternatives was to have an embedded SSD cache of around 256GB and then a 2TB HDD. But their solution is more elegant, as that would have games doing a lot more house management than they would have to do now.

SSDs are great tech for next-gen consoles. Gen defining tech. But they don't come cheap. They at least give us options, they aren't forcing us to have to buy some sort of proprietary device just so we can hoard more games. We have the choice of doing some house management or getting cold storage. The alternative is simply that they put in bigger SSDs, and that would simply mean the consoles are more expensive. I ould particularly expect people on forms to get that.

I personally would have no more than 8 games installed on my SSD at any time, anything above 8 and I would move something to cold storage. It would even be better if that action can be done in the background while i go about doing whatever see I am doing on the console. 

When you don't have to install you surely won't need to use much space... still my 3 or 4 Tb HDD on PS4 had like over 200 full sized games installed (sure most of them wouldn't be 50GB). I know I don't need more than 3 games installed at once, so for me this is a no issue. Not planning to buy a new external HDD for my PS5. It is a lot of money for something I don't really need. I like my disc collection on a shelve but don't need they all installed because I don't play games at random.

Indeed they would understand that... But they are also going to be the first people in line to complain, just the way it is sadly.

I stated we wouldn't get a next-gen console with a 1 Terabyte SSD and 16GB+ of ram at $399. - The price point the Playstation 4 launched at.
I asserted that GDDR6 and NAND would be to expensive... And I was right on that.

The Series S comes under that price bracket but does so by cutting DRAM to 10GB and NAND to 512GB.
The Playstation 5 only had 825GB of NAND... And only manages to hit that price point anyway due to dropping a feature, the optical drive.

But yes, an SSD cache drive could have been an option to maintain cost levels. And I am definitely glad they didn't go that way.
But I would have also loved for more Ram, 16GB isn't allot.

I will stick to having a mechanical disk drive to put games on in cold storage because NAND will loose data over time due to bit flipping.
If it means transferring my favorite games over... Well. So be it.

Larger SSD's will obviously come later in the generation, when the Xbox One/Playstation 4 launched 128-256GB SSD's were the norm even on PC, today 1 terabyte drives are affordable.
In a couple years time? I fully expect 2 terabyte drives to be much more achievable.

I would probably have a select few favorite titles on the internal SSD and just buy an SSD expansion card to put "rubbish" games on so to speak rather than drive up the read/writes on the internal SSD. Something I have done on the Switch to keep the internal NAND as healthy as possible for system longevity.

I was of the impression 16GB of RAM wasn't enough too, but now, not so much. As you know,most of the RAMin any gaming system is used as a cache for the assets needed to render the frame. As Cerny describes, devs used to have to try and keep the next 20-30 seconds of possible gameplay in RAM.

Surely, if you an bring that number down to th next 3 seconds (though Cerny claims the next 1 second) then that is also saving you a massive chunk of what would have been otherwise,e an efficient use of RAM.

Truth be told is that after my last PC WD NVMe SSD failure, I have become scared of SSDs, Only reason I am not too worried about the next gen consoles is because I believe most of the activity on their SSDs would be reads as opposed to writes. For my cold storage,I am staying well away from SSDs. Would get the fastest HDD I can find and call it a day.

I imagine these cross-gen games still use the old pre-baked lighting methods. The 'promise' of next gen was dynamic lighting which saves a ton on disk space. But it will be a few years before that becomes reality.

For "specific" reflections. And maybe shadows. Don't mean they won't use baked lighting in some areas. There are about 4 or 5 lighting based ways of implementing RT.

File sizes are painful given the extreme limited ps5 internal space and the lack of being able to store ps5 games on an external.