No - because most users also don't check install size on games, and unlike renting overpriced storage from a cloud provider, users paid a fixed price for storage up front and aren't getting price gouged nearly as badly. So it's a trade that makes sense.
Both entrants in the market are telling you that "install size isn't that important".
If you asked the player base of this game whether they'd prefer a smaller size, or more content - the vast majority would vote content.
If anything, I'd wager this decision was still driven by internal goals for the company, because producing a 154gb artifact and storing it for things like CI/CD are still quite expensive if you have a decent number of builds/engineers. Both in time and money.
You are saying, that most users don't check install size of their games. Which I am not convinced of, but might even be true. Lets assume this to be true for the moment. How does this contradict, what I stated? How does users being uninformed or unaware of technical details make it so that suddenly cramming the user's disk is "caring" instead of "not caring"? To me this does not compute. Users will simply have a problem later, when their TBs of disk space have been filled with multiple such disk space wasters. Wasting this much space is user-hostile.
Next you are talking about _content_, which most likely doesn't factor in that much at all. Most of that stuff is high resolution textures, not content. It's not like people are getting significantly more content for bigger games. It is graphics craze, that many people don't even need. I am still running around with 2 full-HD screens, and I don't give a damn about 4k resolution textures. I suspect that a big number of users doesn't have the hardware to run modern games fluently at 4k.
"There is a limited amount of time, money, and effort that will be spent on any project. Successful enterprises focus those limited resources on the things that matter most to their customers. In this case, disk usage in the ~150gb range did not matter much in comparison to the other parts of the game, such as in-game content, missions, gameplay, etc."
We know this, because the game had a very successful release, despite taking 150gb to install.
I'm not saying they should have filled that 100 extra gb with mission content - I'm implying they made the right call in focusing their engineering manpower on creating content for the game (the ACTUAL gameplay) and not on optimizing storage usage for assets. That decision gave them a popular game which eventually had the resources to go optimize storage use.
It's not even about graphics it's about load time on HDD. Which turns out didn't benefit all that much.
I can see customers being much more annoyed at a longer load time than a big install size as this has become pretty common.
I mean.. A few years ago, 1TB SSDs were still the best buy and many people haven't ugpraded still, and wasthing 15% of your total storage on just one game is still a pain for many.
