Next-generation games are already proving to be seriously impressive. The Unreal Engine 5 reveal showed us the major advancements in lighting and precision detail developers will be able to design new games with. Unreal's Lumen and Nanite tech, along with the advancement in console hardware within the PS5 and XSX represent a huge leap in video game technology. There's an elephant in the room though, and it's there every time we talk about micropolygon rendering and environments made up of billions of triangles. How freaking big are these game files going to be?
Games are constantly taking up more and more storage space. AAA games require 60-100gbs of free space to install, and sometimes even a lot more. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare has a notoriously huge file size. It's currently 180gbs and gets larger with every patch. That's half of the available hard drive space on a non-upgraded PS4 or Xbox One. This is a problem that's only going to get worse next generation.
Part of the problem will be substantially curbed by new SSD architecture. Hard drives speed things up by duplicating data so that files are most accessible and easier to find. This won't be the case when games are developed for SSDs. This may help to reduce the size of games, but its likely file sizes will increase as image quality and complexity increases, just as they have every console generation.
Storage is always getting cheaper, but it's certainly not cheap. It isn't unreasonable to expect players will need drives will 2 TB or more just to hold a handful of games on their consoles, and they can't just be any old SSD either. The Xbox Series X has a proprietary expansion slot that will any except certain SSDs made for the Xbox, and the PS5 will only accept Sony certified M.2 SSDs in the PS5.
While the Xbox Series X will come with 1TB of internal storage and the Ps5 will come with 885 GB, AAA games will likely fill that space quickly. A generic 2TB SSD still costs $200 at a minimum. We don't yet know what a Sony-Certified or what Seagate's XBS 1 TB memory cards will cost, but anyone planning on buying a next-gen console should prepare themselves for the very real possibility that additional storage is going to increase their investment significantly.
It's worth mentioning that cloud gaming would completely solve this problem for those with the bandwidth that can support it. Streaming services like Google Stadia and Nvidia Geforce Now do not require any local storage space at all for games. Players that use these services have full access to all of the games available, at any time, without downloads or the need for storage capacity. Of course, the libraries on those platforms are much smaller currently, but as they continue to grow they may eventually pose a significant competitive challenge to traditional consoles. Xbox is already experimenting with this potential future with Project xCloud. It may just to come down to what happens first: SSDs become dirt cheap, or the average internet speed becomes fast enough for game streaming.