Ark, Star Citizen, Flight Simulator are a few examples. But for now it also depends if you play on 4K or not while in a few month things will change, especially with Unreal Engine 5.
And yeah if you start moding Skyrim, GTA V and the soon to come Starfield, you better have more than 16gb.
Yep I completely agree on that. Building a top of the top PC has never been a good move, even 10 years ago (I'd make an exception for the 1080 at her time, that thing was a BEAST).
On the settings getting really performance hungry, I agree too. Especially with ray tracing... Thank god DLSS exist.
case with flight sim changed, it now plays perfectly with 16 gb even at very high settings (not maxed out)
16 gb, as long as you don't go overboard on background stuff and mods (i'm not saying completely ditching it for both, just don't go overboard), will last through the
whole generation. this gen, devs will most likely target even better graphics, higher resolutions. in terms of allocated vram and ram, last gen had 3.5-4 gb gpu pool and 2.5-3 gb cpu pool, which allowed 8 gb ram to be quite performant on all lastgen games. this gen however, they seem to target 8-10 gb gpu pool and a mere 3.5-5 gb of cpu pool, which will quite possibly limit, block and stop any potential improvements with physics and stuff.
flight sim on xbox sx settings uses barely 5-7 GB RAM, and 5-7 GB VRAM, which falls in line with what series x has in terms of memory.
tarkov and star citizen will likely will never be fixed, but i dont believe they will ever get a console port either.
the fact that xbox sx port forced flight simulator from using a raw, untouched 11-12 GB on my system to 5-6 GB RAM, makes me believe that we won't be transitioning to "32 GB recommended" territories for a long time.
to begin with, most games that had trouble with 8 GB could be alleviated by turning off background apps. case in point, most lastgen games + heavy background stuff only realistically uses 9-10 GB. believe me, i've been using my 16 gb system for what, 5 years now, and i've yet to see any occurence aside from star citizen and flight simulator, that filled that last 6-7 GB free empty memory. and funnily, flight simulator devs fixed it. if anything, most games currently now have a 5-7 GB RAM empty waiting to be utilized by games. if there was a way to get dual channel benefits from 12 GB RAM, such as 6+6 configuration, believe me, it wouuld be more popular, because 16 GB RAM actually was the overkill amount up until now. now, however, it is at the optimal level.
even in flight sim, graphically a true next generational game, i still had 3-4 GB empty memory. that tells a lot (mind you video below has recording going on about it so naturally it will have a bit more ram usage)
as i said, no need for hyperboles. even this rig manages to get 25-33 fps in new york at high settings... its a rig some people would tout as "not able to play ps4 ports!! (in reality, pushing 1080p 50-60 fps in most of them) ram usage is also as seen.