curious what you would consider "a lot of state" or a "normal level of state"
A lot of state, for a video game, would be games like Minecraft, Roblox, Little Big Planet, Second Life, etc. where you're dealing with a lot of data that isn't static, might also be heavyweight media and user-authored scripting, and you have to put real thought into what a user's footprint will be. Subnautica also had a lot of state although the reason for that was the scrapped terraforming feature (voxel-based, you could sculpt the whole 4km3 world, it's still in the game if you know how to enable it) so, as released, it was juggling a massive amount of state for nothing and paid a high cost in both complexity and performance.
Normal levels of state for a game are you've got Dude Everyman and his collection of 10-20 inventory squares who exists at an x,y,z,parent position, has maybe 100 flags, some health and gun juice, and there are maybe 10 nearby enemies. These games could serialize their state into less than 1k if someone on the team cared enough. Everything else is run-time state and not relevant to "why is our database melting through to China".
For Star Citizen, you were pretty close to Dude Everyman in theory until fairly recently, at least as far as on-disk state goes. The addition of damage maps to ships requires that map to get saved (while just a texture, it's a lot more than they had before), and the recent feature of persistent littering means you've got a bunch of penguins with x,y,z,parent coordinates to dump into your favorite spatial data structure somewhere. That's really not much state per user though, maybe it sounds cooler when Chris talks about it, but I have more labels placed on a hiking website's map than I have penguins on planets, and the cost of these features is similar.
There's a lot of "NEVER BEEN DONE BEFORE" talk in Star Citizen land, but everyone outside of video games considers these to be quite small footprints per user, and within video games, even Ultima Online back in '98 was weightier. It had players with several thousand items to their name, several thousand decorations placed in their houses, you could drop things in the world persistently (eventually they added something like an 8 hour decay time because the world was getting trashed), you could write into books in the world persistently, and they later added custom houses as well (stolen straight from The Sims Online whose programmers never got the credit they deserved). You could also drive your boat full of garbage both in the hold and scattered on deck with as many players as you could cram onto it across the server boundaries as UO had a seamless world with what the cult knows as "static server meshing". It was a bit janky, and if you played UO and remember your tillerman occasionally saying "Ar, turbulent water!", this would trigger when crossing server boundaries as a bit of a gag by the devs to cover for players occasionally ending up overboard.
)), if it'll come under the "Alternative History" section rather than "Sci-Fi"?
