I don't think there's a lot of evidence for that. Game sizes have balooned over time because of higher-resolution assets and audio files. Not to mention developers sometimes used repeated files to cut on lookup times, or left them uncompressed to reduce CPU overhead.

Yeah, downloading multiple language packs or 4K textures that you aren't going to use sucks, and is directly corelated to developers trying to cut corners, but at least on PC you can manually fix that to a large extent, and it's a symptom of longer development times rather than the consequence of increased storage.

Now seeing it with Cyberpunk 2077. It takes the cyber and punk out of it. Just looked like City. Any city.Cyberpunp as a setting is not what it is without grit, dirt and grime.

In the future, gamers will demand neural rendering and sequence generation in every games. Right now those anti new tech and performance loss will complain. But even looking back GeForce 3 was so bad with shaders as it tanked performance when normal mapping and pixel shading was used. Now, realistic game must use shaders to make surfaces and characters have realistic depth and lighting. This is the future folks, you just don't know much about the tech if you think this is unnecessary.

AI slop is trash, there's a good reason much of society increasingly hates and rejects it.

It enshittifies everything and serves no real purpose beyond enriching the Epstein class.

History shows it doesn't depend. They all conform eventually to the outcome that our economic system rewards. Remember when SSDs came for this generation of consoles and they boosted how games can be smaller now because they don't need to copy the same chunks over and over so it reads faster? Whoops

LOL you're wrong about DLSS 5 and AI in general. Androids and automated services will take care of elderly and sick people way better than a human that despites his/her job. Be prepared for joblessness in not so distant future. Either embrace AI or be homeless.

"People with performance loss will complain"

That's literally everyone.   And not some minor loss.  Many times the hit is more than half performance.  Secondly people will not 'demand' this.  Its pretty cool but I  can wait for the tech to improve and performance to make is it viable.   Also this will 100% kill off many human jobs in art production.     People still matter to me and I am speaking as someone who does use productive AI tools already.  I actually acknowledge the reality of the situation.

My biggest concern is that the 'look' of the game may be locked behind a high end Nvidia purchase.  This is exacerbated if AMD and Intel offer their own versions.  Like are there 3 different artistic visions for one game?  How is the game supposed actually look?  For this reason i think there will need to be an open (FSR like) base model that can present the game similarly on all systems.

It obviously does depend. Developers and publishers aren't a hive mind. Trends exist, but I'm not really seeing a poor optimization trend caused by SSD's or ML upscaling...

SSD and advanced compression technologies never promised small file sizes across the board. They promised a smaller file size compared to the alternative. There are elements (like higher quality assets and more content) naturally pushing toward larger file size. This doesn't necessarily mean games with high quality assets or more content aren't well optimised. The extra size comes with tangible benefits.

The fact that SSD's are very expensive logically promotes optimization.

Yeah, this is my number 1 question when it comes to this approach - so eventually everyone has it's own neural rendering , and devs need to do 3 different versions, or just ignore other vendors - that is, unless it converges into some industry standard API.

On top of that, there's abysmal performance, at least with this version on current hardware.

Corps are laying off people by the tens of thousands for this AI bullshit and cities are without power and people are dying for this AI bullshit. So all your dumbass post says is

"either embrace being jobless and homeless  or be jobless and homeless"

AI bros are the worst people. blocked.