Yes, and my estimate was “hundreds of megabytes if not gigabytes per hour”. So apparently Netflix also agrees with me.
> Games need to load that much data in under a minute.
This is based on design decisions from the programmers, not some kind of iron law of nature. Obviously you can’t just drop a game designed for one set of constraints into an entirely different context without change and expect it to work precisely the same way.
No, it's based on that's what textures and model quality expectations are. Reducing that size is directly reducing image quality.
You can make a web based game that looks straight out of 2002, sure. But you can't make one that looks contemporary, and WASM+WebGPU aren't changing that.
And of course no game developer is going to bend over backwards and make their game look like shit so it can run in a web browser for no reason other than to satisfy the ridiculous beliefs of web evangelists.
Think of it as if video keyframes were 1GB. Video streaming wouldn't exist in such a world as nobody is going to watch a loading spinner for 20 minutes. No, it'd all be a world of pre-fetched, downloaded content. Which unsurprisingly is exactly how game stores & consoles work.
Here's some coverage of the storage architecture of new consoles and why it's such a big upgrade: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15848/storage-matters-xbox-ps...
Trying to shove lazy asset loading over the internet into that picture just doesn't work.