I read that after patches GTA V is now around 95GB.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War is around 200GB fully installed with all features (HD textures etc).

Some people have insinuated this is intentional to crowd out other games on console hard disks and make moving away from CoD have an opportunity cost. It's probably just laziness.

I haven't looked into it in the past but some prior offenders had a lot of space wasted from uncompressed multi-lingual audio. Instead of letting us choose a language it installs them all so you can switch in game, and uncompressed for saving the CPU for game logic. For CoD the optional HD texture pack is 38GB so that's still a lot unaccounted for.

Titanfall did this. If I recall correctly, the full install size was about 48GB, 35GB of which was just uncompressed audio. And that was back in the days when 120GB (or less) SSDs were common. A total self-own and never fixed or understood.

It's not like decoding audio takes enough time on any modern multi-core processor to disrupt the game loop. It's not even on the radar.

I mean. Jesus christ. Devs used to be proud they could optimize and run their programs on slow machines. What happened? Thats like making a game for casual players but only < 5% of the global population can even afford to play it. How does this make business sense?? I'd understand if it was a game breaking new ground with some hectic VR or something like that but it isnt.