The problem here is that going from NES to SNES, the difference was night and day. Even when comparing late gen NES titles like Kirby to launch titles like Super Mario World. The same thing goes for PS1 to PS2, and PS2 to PS3. But going from Original Xbox to PS3/360 wasn't that big of a difference right out of the gate. So people were dissappointed going from gen 6 to gen 7. And with the PS4 people were rightfully dissapointed going from PS3 to PS4, because the late gen PS3 games looked nearly identical to the launch title PS4 games.

I think you are looking at it wrong.

What happens is that as tech evolves, the perceptable graphical difference from one generation to the next is less noticeable by the human eye.

I imagine next gen will be an even harder sell. It also begs the question, do we even need better graphics than this? Personally, i don't. Though i could do with better performance (60fps). That s what i'd like from next gen.

Yeah, I'm convinced that 60 FPS with 4K is about all they will be able to do for next gen. Whether it's PC or otherwise. It just takes too much time for artists to put in enough work to get photo-realism. Even if a PC or console could process that level of detail, hiring the artists wouldn't be feasible. We already have artists working 60 hours a week, just to get the level of graphics that we see on current gen systems. And those games made by 60 hour weeks of labor, need to charge $60, plus an expansion pass to make money back. So unless we want games to cost $120 for a complete edition we are better off just staying where we are at graphicswise, and focusing on resolution/framerate for next gen. 

Indeed XD.

People always make those arguments, often with some validity, in the early years of a generation. But, once you get into the back half of a gen, the devs have figured out the hardware, and are bringing games to market that were built from the ground up with the current generation in mind. We're at that point in the current generation. Many AAA games are mind-blowingly awesome right now.

Not all improvements to visuals increase the workload of artists, some graphics techniques actually do the complete opposite... And speed up the process.

I think we are starting to see more games leverage Photogrammetry and Global Illumination now, which has been fantastic. (Halo, Battlefront. etc'.)

As for the price... Well. Publishers are bloody greedy, let's leave it at that. - They aren't going broke or struggling financially that's for sure.

Great! After almost 4 years and a mid gen upgrade! We finally past from 7.5 gen. It's so good that you people  can understand that takes time for developers to mature a new HW.

Unless it's Nintendo. If they don't show something right from the start they won't see the end of it

Those are all just bells and whistles though. Nothing revolutionary. Sub-Surface Scattering hardly makes a difference unless you are modeling something that is semi-translucent, like the mucous membranes around an alien creature's jaws. I can't tell the difference between AF and No AF, unless I specifically look for it where a texture starts to tile on the floor. Lighting is nice, but you can still get really good looking scenes by baking the lighting in beforehand. There was definitely a huge leap from PS3 to PS4 in the lighting department when it came to open world games. That's because a moving sun makes baked lighting impractical. But lighting is only one thing out of several things that make up a scene.

If you know what you're doing, and know the limitations of your system, you can make things look really great. Did you know that the environmental geometry in Dead Space is so low poly you could run it on a PS2? It only looks so good because of the fantastic texture work. 

I get your point, but to have photo-realistic graphics we need artists that can make photo-realistic textures for human faces, as well as other complicated creatures. So you need a group of artists that can both paint at a photo-realistic level, and paint in the freaky skewed way that an unwrap requires. And the texture being created for a photo-realistic model needs to not only be that great, but it needs to be able to handle whatever animation is thrown on the final model as well. And to boot, it needs to look good from all possible angles. 

The only way I can think of to surpass this hurdle is to have some computer program take ten thousand pictures of an actor's face, and then somehow merge them into the ultimate texture. But just getting 3DS Max to do a good unwrap of a complicated model on it's own is damned near impossible. A human always has to step in. So my hopes for such tech are not very high. 

They specified that this gameplay sequence was on a PS4 Pro.