I think of Flight Sim as somewhat of a different beast. The reason streaming is required on it is because it encompasses the planet which is a big thing. But generally, the bandwidth to stream the data necessary for a flight over Utah or something is not absolutely massive. The prospect of downloading a game level on the fly with the kind of fidelity of the UE5 demo is something else entirely. Surely it's at least a couple orders of magnitude more data dense than anything in Flight Sim.
And I understand the thought that "streaming costs money so on console is preferable", but the technology du jour for Microsoft and Sony (and others) is getting players invested in subscription services. With players more amenable to the concept of monthly subscriptions for gaming than they have ever been in the past I feel the old logic of developers shying away from active services due to upkeep costs will be out of date.
Regardless, for now this thought just stems from a small article and the reality of massive game sizes to match the increased fidelity paired with the pitiful console SSD's. I'll just have to wait and see to understand what Microsoft/Sony/Epic have in mind.
