don't shit on those of use who actually put effort into our hobby

A 1tb SSD is ~$90. It's not some crazy ask

This take is very telling of the privileged economic background you come from. Totally out of touch with the reality most of your fellow humans live in.

I’ll be very surprised if you aren’t some white colonialist nepo-baby

They need 15% of that space.

It isn't about the drives or if people can afford a certain size SSD (although that matters more than you are admitting). It's about asking better of people and companies responsible for destroying over a decade of hardware advancement due to bad optimization (to save money), overly-abstracted frameworks (to save money), and improper handling of assets (to save money).

They made a mistake in not prioritizing this, they fixed it and admitted there was a problem. That's good. What isn't good is people polishing their knobs as if the devs did this out of the goodness of their heart. They didn't, they were losing players because people were speaking with time and money. Just like you wanted. Just like people in this thread are doing.

But glancing through your other replies I'll just stop here. May your drive space remain vast, and your tolerance for badly-optimized software remain stronger than mine.

Bruh, this is a crazy, defensive rant. You're defending multi-million dollar companies who are bad at their jobs and blaming the consumer who is getting poorer and poorer every year. Using COD as an example for normal, a famously repetitive franchise game whose developer is corpo as hell is not a good look. How many people at that studio are getting paid a good wage even relative to industry standard and not suffering burnout and other bad practices. Helldiver's just proved that A) you can have something like 6x bloat for no reason which they themselves say will hardly impact HDDs B) this is largely technical incompetence as they vetted their initial assumptions and found them flawed.

This isn't about them supporting HDD's, they said they'll barely be impacted. This is about a developer not knowing what they need to do to make a successful game and slowly figuring out what is unnecessary. If COD cared, they could lower it too.

Imagine this in another product. Say you were looking at buying some clothes, and because they didn't want to pay someone to cut the fabric, they just folded it over, stitched the outline of a shirt, and left all the fabric on the inside. Then when you point out that they must either be unskilled as tailors because they can't even manage simple seam allowance, or greedy, because they choose not to just to add maybe a few pennies to the stockholder's dividends, some loser who gets zero benefit from the extra fabric runs out of nowhere to explain how 'it's your fault. Don't you have room in your closet for the extra material? Why don't you just move to a bigger house? I'm morally superior because I'm complaining about your complaining about something you can't fix rather than about the people who have the power to make the changes choosing not to! Why don't you stick to wearing your hand-stitched designer clothes made with love and care if you can't afford to buy a closet big enough to house all the pointless wastage of these incredible producers of generic, lowest common denominator, middle of the road, unoriginal t-shirts that people mostly buy because of marketing and familiarity bias? Don't you know the only people who matter are the wealthy?'

But we're not talking about compressing data. Just not wasting storage by having duplicate data in there. And I fail to see how it is a user's problem when it's the developers who are introducing the issue to begin with. If you are sold a product with an easily fixable problem from factory, you don't take it accept the fault as your own.

I got 4TB of total storage, but i struggle severely with storage between all the car and flight sims with mods, multiplayer games with massive installs, and enormous single player games.