Increases in production costs are outstripping increases in revenue

[Parokki]

I'm not going to pretend I completely understand the technology behind games nowadays, but it's starting to look increasingly obvious to me that the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 adopted HD graphics before they became financially viable.

I don't think anyone is going to deny that games in HD are much more expensive to make than ones in SD, and it's pretty logical to say that development being more expensive means less content, and less risk making/originality. This assumption is backed pretty strongly by how so many otherwise great recent games have been extremely short, and multiplayer oriented. Gears of War, Heavenly Sword, Uncharted, CoD4, and Halo 3 all have single player modes that take less than ten hours to beat. Shortness works for a lot of games like Shadow of the Colossus or Portal, but I really don't want it to become the standard.

Someone threw the following quote at me a few days ago. I don't know how reliable it is, but if the truth is anything close to that, then I'm pretty shocked.

Kazunori Yamauchi (Polyphony Digital) said that it took about 30 days for one person to build the complete model of a single car for a Gran Turismo game on the PS2, compared to 1 day for the PS1 games. On the PS3 it takes 180 days.

I like to look at HD graphics and all, but it's starting to look like adopting them too soon is holding back games way more than the Wii's lower horsepower ever will.