I assume that for now they're currently "saved" by the main delivery mechanism being discs still. And somewhat lagging behind the movie standards at that. I assume the X can't use HD Blu Ray for games which puts a semi-cap on the game sizes like DVD did for last gen.
Though it's kinda crazy that downloads have semi-erased even this limit, and they're only limited by the fact that they're putting 500GB/1TB drives in the consoles. (Except for those select S's that have 2TB.) It's like the first time people underestimated bandwidth growth. (Although Microsoft seemed to first overestimated and then reversed with all their CLOUD talk before walking back.)
I remember the dev people I was in contact with back during the 360/PS3 "HD" changeover and the magnitude of scale in everything just destroying workflows they had used for like a decade. You look and a lot of those PS2 games were like 1/2GB (best shown by the GameCube having versions) and for sub 480p resolutions at that, then they had to "theoretically" jump up to image qualities for 720p, while keeping audio and everything else that was most disc space on DVDs. And that was nothing compared to what that gen later did, this gen has done, let alone the next.
Talking about Criterion in the other thread, one of the reasons I read Renderware never made it over and EA never used it after intending to make it sorta the same studiowide techbase and eventually went with Frostbite was that it turned into a mess trying to scale it up especially the pipelines and tools. (Frostbite wound up being this too apparently.) Even Burnout Paradise is running on a hodge podge of new stuff instead of being Renderware+Work like their prior games.
And the team size explosions! Kojima's startup has over a hundred people, and it has Guerrilla Games doing a lot of the base techwork. I just saw that Epic Games and its subsidiaries are closing in on 800+ people and they aren't even really making anything announced outside of UE and Fortnite as they've just cancelled Paragon.
Far Cry 5 has five Ubisoft studios working on it, Ass Creed Origins had eight, so did Wildlands. And a bunch of those studios have 500+ people, Montreal has 3000. I have to assume EA's numbers are only going up to accommodate the Star Wars stuff.
The Kotaku report was saying Visceral itself had fallen well under a hundred employees and so they were farming out a lot of the grunt work to Vancouver and Montreal studios already so EA looked at it and said "we should just make the game there since we basically already are" and shut down Visceral.
