since when did graphics > gameplay?

[Spore]

It all started with the marketing campaign of Sega for the Genesis. They featured the 16bit graphics of the Genesis versus the NES. Yup, the Genesis started out as a NES competitor. Nintendo actually fell for this and went into graphics race with its competitors. Since then, except for their handhelds Nintendo had the most powerful console in each generation until the Gamecube. It was only until the Wii that they reassessed this strategy and took a different path with the Wii. So Sony and Microsoft are stuck in a graphics race that have been abandoned by the two companies that started it. That's why the marketing of PS4 and Xbox One games are not so different from the marketing tactic harnessed by Sega almost three decades ago. This is despite the fact that game graphics have already hit a sensory threshold similar to the sound fidelity threshold peaking at 16bit sound. Because of this it isn't enough to just show trailers or screenshots of games. Marketers need to show side-by-side comparisons just to nitpick the minute differences in graphics. Having said all that, I believe there was a time that pushing graphics added significant value in video games but that is not the case now. The problem now is that because of the focus on game graphics in the past decades development in gameplay has been left behind. This was also not helped by the fact that game production budgets have skyrocketed to unsustainable levels because of the push for high fidelity graphics. A consequence of this is the closure of more that 150 game studios since 2006. That is why Nintendo has scaled down on graphics to focus more on gameplay and encourage more games to be made leading to more innovations in game design.