In the next ten years (closer to ten than not) we'll need it for massive and or hyper intricate 4k VR worlds, the assets of which you won't want to download every time you load up the world/s. You'll want to hold as many of the assets locally in something extremely fast, if not ram then the next best thing. That is until we commonly have 10gbps plus to the home.
RAM and VRAM these days are huge, and SATA is definitely fast enough to stream assets from. Heck, I load most of my games from an old 2.5" spinning HDD that I pulled from a dead laptop.
I think more improvement is needed on the VRAM side than on the disk side, so HBM2 hype > Optane hype :)
In the next ten years (closer to ten than not) we'll need it for massive and or hyper intricate 4k VR worlds, the assets of which you won't want to download every time you load up the world/s. You'll want to hold as many of the assets locally in something extremely fast, if not ram then the next best thing. That is until we commonly have 10gbps plus to the home.