this is mostly a usian trend, more polygons and shit equals to quality.
don't need to look at the past, just look at japan.
jrpgs continue to amaze me on how light they are compared to other aaa titles
The indie sector is also keeping it mostly lean. No other game has made me cry like Signalis did, and it's less than a gig.
It's because developer time is more expensive the lives of the children toiling in African mines
Really?
It depends on what the video talks about exactly. There are some games like Call of Duty that are over 80GB in size for no reason other than the devs do not bother optimising for size, either because they do not give a shit or because the deadlines that the publishers give them do not allow it. To get extremely political about it, hardware is as cheap as it is because of imperialism. The minerals mined in Africa under harrowing conditions is a big reason why. If it was mined by Americans (for example), then Americans would not be able to afford it which is a sad irony. It would be impossible a PS5 that costs 400 to 500 USB to have the 500 to 1000 GB SSD space which it has to host the game if the dirty work was not being done by the global south for dirt cheap.
Software in general has become liberal about utilising hardware resources as hardware has become cheaper and more efficient. I am not sure how a computer engineer of 20 years ago would react if you told them that today's web browsers consume 500 MB of RAM while idle. That's not to say that software has not gotten better. Software has gotten faster and more efficient as well. But optimisation is not prioritised as it was back when hardware was more scarce. For example, the "hello world" binary of Rust is several megabytes in size. Rust is the programming language that Google recently said should be used instead of C++ now. But out of the box it is optimised really badly for disk space usage. You can cut down the binary size but as I said optimisation in that department is not prioritised because how cheap disk space is because of imperialism.
While the vid is talking about disk space, I find that the games are also getting way too big in terms of length with most of the game just being filler. This is especially true for open world games where there's very little actual content to be had. Most of the game ends up being repetitive fetch quests, or grinding for levels with a handful of hours of actual story sandwiched in here and there. Once in a while you see a game that can genuinely justify its length, Last of Us series is a good example of this, but more often than not games feel long for the sake of being long. Another aspect I've come to resent is how games have to pile on different mechanics like crafting because it's just what's expected. A lot of the time it doesn't really add anything and just forces you to do more scavenging quests.
Nowadays, I pretty much exclusively play indie games precisely because they tend to be shorter and more focused. Sometimes less really is more. Viewfinder is the latest game I've played. It's like 6-8 hours in length, and it's just perfect.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
