| NJ5 said: What about development costs... will many developers be able to afford using all the capabilities of the new consoles? |
This is the issue, more so than diminishing returns of graphical improvements as photo-realism is approached.
Developing the assets for such powerful systems gets more and more expensive in a graphical arms race. Even with added efficiencies of improved development software and render assisting hardware, the development budget (on average) increases more and more each generation. SNES games were about $200K per game, N64 $2M, GameCube $5M, and now PS3 games are hitting $20M quite often.
This leads developers down and endless path of sequels and metrics washing (making games appeal to the Lowest Common Denominator to sell more copies). This leaves players with watered down games that look pretty, but don't have much depth, creativity, or intrinsically rewarding challenges.
I think the focus has to turn to lowering development costs at some point, before the industry crashes due to stagnation out of risk mitigation.
