They don't have cut-scenes in 4k HDR though. Even the latest Age of Empires downloads an extra 40GB if you enable 4k HDR. It's nice that they give the option at least.

Uncompressed high res textures and audio and a lot of unique assets.

When disk space isn’t a problem and with loading times being already rather fast (other than any shader pre-compilations that are CPU bound) there is no penalty to large games.

Not only that but having very large games can be sort of a moat especially on consoles, if you can only have 3 games until your drive gets full you might think twice before uninstalling call of duty to try something new.

And whilst this can also present a barrier to entry the big IPs have enough initial pull to overcome any downsides most likely.

Games are designed to take advantage of the hardware capabilities commonly available in gaming PCs and consoles. If CPU/GPU performance or RAM/storage capacity increases, it's always possible to make a game a little bit better by taking advantage of it.

2 TB SSDs became affordable ~5 years ago, and HDDs of similar size were affordable long before that. Unless you have a laptop from a manufacturer with a pricing model designed to create artificial scarcity of storage space, 100-gigabyte games are not a real issue.

Digital downloads are the main form of selling games so developers are not limited by the size of the physical medium (CD, DVD, cartridge etc.)

Also for performance reasons most games are shipped with uncompressed lossless assets which adds up to become huge.

>What happened?

Consumers' computers have more space. There was always a trade off between optimizing for disk space and all the other things that go into making a game. As demand for the former has fallen, developers responded accordingly.

There is absolutely some bloat in 100gb+ games but also come on, graphics are much better now compared to 15 years old games. Textures + video cinematic + models weight a lot.