For gaming, this doesn't bother me much, given that, even at today's prices, the cost of maintaining a midrange gaming PC with ample storage and "recommended" specs for new releases is probably no more than $200-$300/year.

The ever-increasing system requirements of productivity software, however, never ceases to amaze me:

Acrobat Exchange 1.0 for Windows (1993) required 4 MB RAM and 6 MB free disk space.

Rough feature parity with the most-used features of modern Acrobat also required Acrobat Distiller, which required 8 MB RAM and another 10 MB or so of disk space.

Acrobat for Windows (2025) requires 2,000 MB RAM and 4,500 MB free disk space.

Further there is PDF software (read, write) that often does the same things that is much less heavy.

I for one simply cannot believe that a game with 4K+ textures and high poly count models is bigger than a game that uses billboard sprites which aren't even HD. Whatever could be the reason? A complete mystery...