I found this pretty interesting and thought I'd share.
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Really interesting. Warning! If you want to watch it, it's 20 mins long. Might wana go grab some snacks.
He brings up good points on how large number are just that. Really, if you go to big then people will just not care about the little things as they just run through the content. Hitting the reload on the procedural generator over and over.
I also how he brings up that there are already games larger then the big number leader No man's Sky. CIV 5 was kind of a stretch but it proved his point
A few fun facts about Elite (1984) can be found on wiki ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game) ) , which has an exhaustive and interesting amount of trivia from interviews with the developers:
Braben and Bell at first intended to have 2^48 galaxies, but Acornsoft insisted on a smaller universe to hide the galaxies' mathematical origins.
The thing is, Acornsoft realized the target audience would not believe, or be able to grasp, they could pack 4 294 967 296 planets in a computer with 32 768 - 65 536 bytes of memory.
Another funny tidbit from the same wiki:
Braben and Bell also checked that none of the system names were profane - removing an entire galaxy after finding a planet named "Arse".
RNG FTW.
And yeah, it is the same Braben behind Elite: Dangerous ( http://store.steampowered.com/app/359320/ ).
Bell, on the other hand has a nerd site which is educational in many ways: http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/ .
Also, I happen to have enjoyed the recent open source version of Elite ( http://www.oolite.org/ ) far more than No Man's Sky.
(Am a BIG fan of their early work)