This is not true.
- Game engines are making game development faster than this gen.
I'm not really seeing it, at least as yet. There's certainly scope for improvement, but it does look like the bottlenecks and expense still exist at the resource mastering phase - and it's quite possible some companies will take the increased RAM as an reason to produce even
more resources than they did in the previous one. Our artists on the PS2 - with the pittance of RAM that thing had - *loved* to pack in as many textures as they could squeeze in.
- Devs will not need to spend as much time optimizing for memory because of the much larger amounts.
That's not how it works. Well, let me rephrase that: It's not how it *should* work. A memory budget is written at the start of development determining what space is available in the worst-case scenario, and then the game is designed
within those constraints. It's not a case of giving the artists free reign, and *then* trying to make it fit.
That said, it's not perfect, and occasionally the budget has to shift one way or the other, and savings need to be found; I've done that job myself on several titles. It's a job of one experienced programmer or one experienced designer (or both!) - depending on whether you're making savings by cutting content out of a level or optimising the code - for a day or so, that's it.
It's a pain to do, and it's a bit dependent on exactly how the project is structured but it's not *particularly* time-consuming.