Because companies know they can get away with it. Unless consumers start pushing for change, nothing will.

I'm reinstalling For Honor currently, and this game is fucking OBESE It takes a whopping 94GB of space on my fucking computer, It makes me glad technological advancements in virtual memory storage allow us to put this game anywhere, could you imagine putting 94GB of data on floppy disks? It would take tens of thousands of them.

Yep, that's a chonker! The only modern AAA game I cave to is Sea of Thieves sitting at a hefty 101GB. You could fit that on 135 Zip disks!

not a problem if you're the kind of guy who only plays 500mb freeware games

what the hell 101 GB???? thats 10.1% of my computer!! I feel like games are un-optimized to encourage brand loyalty or something. Like, so someone dedicates most of their storage to X triple AAA studio.

For sure some are, though I can say for some like in the case of Sea of Thieves, it's just poor optimization and a *crag*ton of content.