16GB is enough for gaming today, but some AAA titles are starting to push that. Horizon Zero Dawn eats anywhere from 13-15GB for me. RAM sizes increase regardless as higher capacities get cheaper to produce over time. It never stays at one point, even when it's enough for some. In the next decade, your run-of-the-mill consumer PC or phone could easily come with 32GB of RAM, at least that's how I see it. I don't see how game developers won't take advantage of that.
The price for those amounts of RAM is going to go down to affordable levels where it won't even be a consideration to go with less. Case in point, you can find relatively cheap laptops (sub $500 USD) with 8GB of RAM these days. Back in 2010 that would have cost you an arm and a leg. Now it's just standard for that range of laptops.
For concerns like packed files, it's possible to read out specific segments of a file without loading the entire file into RAM. This is basic I/O in something like C or C++; just point to a file and an offset and start reading. That's what games are doing today as far as I know. The difference increasing RAM sizes will make is that you can unpack a lot more of that file, meaning you don't have to touch storage again for certain assets.
The price for those amounts of RAM is going to go down to affordable levels where it won't even be a consideration to go with less. Case in point, you can find relatively cheap laptops (sub $500 USD) with 8GB of RAM these days. Back in 2010 that would have cost you an arm and a leg. Now it's just standard for that range of laptops.
For concerns like packed files, it's possible to read out specific segments of a file without loading the entire file into RAM. This is basic I/O in something like C or C++; just point to a file and an offset and start reading. That's what games are doing today as far as I know. The difference increasing RAM sizes will make is that you can unpack a lot more of that file, meaning you don't have to touch storage again for certain assets.