With all those NX threads going around this site, I saw a pattern on many comentaries. They think the NX has to have more power than the PS4 if it wants to compete with both this gen and next gen. And that made me think of one thing. With developing costs growing faster than consoles and PC's userbases, we might reach a moment when there's no point on making more powerful hardware (at least, not in a long time) because very few developers are going to spend the cash recquired to use all that power properly. Imagine if games need three times more power to work and they cost three times more to produce, but the userbase has grown only 50% more. How many games would still be finantially succesful?

Just look at PS360. Those consoles have been around for a very long time and they're still kicking. I'm sure they will survive more years than the PS4X-Bone. Their power and developement costs are now very efficient, and with a 160m userbase between the two, most games on them now could be finantially succesful. When will we reach a point when that equilibrium is broken? And what will happen if we ever reach it?

The whole power and cost of games don't quite work like you think it does.

Basically, think of it this way; there is SD development and HD development. HD dev is more expensive. But even at that its finite. Take for instance a game requires the use of 4k texture assets. Making the same game and using 16k texture assets will be a waste of resources because it would be impossible to differentiate between 4k assets and 16k in a game environment though one will be using 4 times the resources.

But there is a minimum requirement for current gen gaming. And the WiiU obviously isn't it. That's why people say the NX should at least be as powerful as the ps4 if it wants to stand a competing chance.

More power doesn't not mean that games will automatically cost more to make. Sometimes it may actually be the opposite. Cause with more power you can also just brute force your way through what you would otherwise have needed 100s of hrs of code optimization to do.

Yes, but that's the thing. With more and more power we may reach a point that both hardware developers don't need to refresh their machines in a very long time (because the ones already on the market are enough) and the software developers find that they don't need to put more resources than needed, because the power at their disposal is enough and because the userbase doesn't grow enough to justify the expenses. When will gaming in general reach that point where noone is really clamouring for more power?

More power does not have to mean more complex or complicated development. There are some easy things you can do to a game that demand a lot of hardware power. Stable high fps, high resolution, intricate lighting, high AA, realistic physics and so on. They all benefit greatly from exponentially more powerful hardware.

Add to that that development tools are getting more and more advanced, making it easier to create complex and great looking games.

So to answer that question, that equilibrium won't be broken for a very long time.

That is a fallacy. There is never enough power. Hardware has and will be lacking behind the demands of software forever.

That point you're looking for is not in sight. Even if we had 5 times as powerful hardware today, software developers would still scream for more.

As vister has already pointed out, we can never quite have enough power. There will always be some sort of software dev that will break whatever hardware we have out there.

I do get what you are talking about though, and the closest we will get to any kinda equilibrium is "its good enough". Which is what happened last gen and will happen this gen too. And all it would mean is that we would shift from a 5yr console cycle to a 7/8yr cycle and then one day to a 10yr cycle and so on.

Sonys first party will always push for more horse power like they do in this generation. Third party devolopers cant compete with Sony anymore so of course they will scale down but sony should just take their market share with their first party games.

Power and cost aren't directly related. You can decrease costs by providing a better architecture and better dev tools. That's what PS4 and X1 did. They are similar to also drive costs down. Sony and MS included devs early on to listen what they wanted, and that's what they delivered to them.

What you are proposing is that we stop the development of CG technology instead of finding better approaches to cut costs down. I imagine when the first car was created that someone probably said "my god, it costs the price of 50 horses! Let's just keep the animals!". You can't hold progress. You solve a technological problem with more tech and better tech, not with worse tech and less tech.

Once development costs get too high, I expect procedural generation to get more popular to help lower development costs. Also, technology could also make other cost-reducing methods possible. And finally, there will always be need for more processing power, so it's only natural it will come into gaming as well. It would be stupid not to take advantage of it somehow.

As hardware gets more powerful, less optimised code becomes acceptable, developers can use higher level languages that makes their life easier.

In the old days you would use an assembler to write in machine code trying to get time critical code in page zero where it ran slightly faster and you were always trying to work out how to get a bit more performance out of that 8bit cpu. When you get a game that makes you wonder if its the real world or artificial then you know you are getting somewhere with regards performance.

However I think there is a point to this. As hardware becomes so powerful that it can run many games simultanously on one computer then we enter a stage where that one computer will be a shared resource which is what another thread I commented on was talking about. Streaming of games being the future. No point me owning my own PC if I'm only using 2% of its performance I may as well share that resource with other people to save money. We are a long way from that time though.