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I'll explain it using Insomniac's GDC presentation for their PS4 exclusive Spider-Man port-mortem as a base reference - links to this presentation have been linked several times in this thread.I know nothing about storage, but i agree because if this simple math:
Insomniac's New York is built around a large number of environment 'tiles' that hold all of the assets for small chunks of New York that load in as you move around. Each tile is 20MB (megabytes) in size and the reason for is because of the way the game streams in data and 20MB/s (second) is about the slowest HDD somebody may put into a PS4. Therefore 20MB is the absolutely effective limit for how much detail (geometry, textures, audio, event scripts, shaders, AI etc) can be included in any single tile.
Let's say for example PS5, with its custom SSD, can stream 6GB/s then Insomniac can build a much denser and more detailed New York for PS5. With more bandwidth you can go nuts, instead of faux interiors to buildings and cars that fall apart when you get close, you could procedurally generate vastly more detailed interiors with more random assets and textures - even NPCs.
Now, imagine Sony want to port PS5's Spider-Man 2 to PC in 2022. The challenge is that although there are a lot of PCs, your game requires a PCs with an SSDs much faster than are common now. So what's your potential market? Or do you revisit the entire world and just dumb it down, reducing the detail to bring down demands on the steaming system?
It's not about the size of the entire game, but about the ability to reliably stream - without hitches - the world fast enough for anything the player does. I thoroughly recommend watching the Insomniac presentation, it'll explains the fundamentals of the problem. It's only the numbers that change.
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