In years prior there were a lot of games and a shifting understanding of what hardware they can require. While gfx needs changed rapidly, hard drive space requirements went up steadily, predictably. As most of us have long abandoned physical media sales and use digital downloads instead, this number has stopped to be defined by the medium’s capacity.
Before and now we had outliers like MMORPGs and movie-like games requiring more estate, while other games like Deep Rock Galactic needing just 4GBs, but there always was some number of gigabytes you as a consumer thought a new game would take.
Where’s that sweet spot now for you?
For me, it’s 60GB, or a 40-80GB range. Something less or more than that causes questions and assumptions. I have a lot of space, but I’d probably decline if some game would exceed 2x of my norm or 120GB of storage.
I feel like the deployment shouldn’t be too difficult. I have the game Street Fighter 6 on steam, and there is an option in the steam menu for whether to download single player content or not. If you disable it, you can save about 20gb, and of course it is enabled by default. I feel like the exact same process could be used for the high end texture packs. Most users would just download everything by default, but if you are someone who cares about your disk space, you could just easily disable it. It would just be on the devs to implement it.