Is the day of unique consoles mostly over?

[Pemalite]

Soundwave said:

The problem is going to be "the graphics are even prettier" means less and less when the point you're already at is already pretty good. 

Case in point ... how many people are super excited for 8K televisions? Not many. Why, because 4K is already more than good enough for most people, a lot of people today still watch a lot of their programming/movies at a mere 1080p or less (cable TV). 

The other problem is going to be that most developers and publishers are already at their breaking point budget wise now. You ask them to double their budgets again from where they are today and it will break a lot of publishers, even Sony we can see from their internal leaked docs is already extremely worried about the budgets for games like Spider-Man 2. So what's going to happen when you need to double/triple that budget to get a large leap forward from Spider-Man 2/3 on PS6? It isn't going to be feasible. 

Honestly I think if you showed even a lay person a video game that had photorealistic graphics today, a lot of people wouldn't care much. Like if you went from this:

To literal photorealism (or close enough), I mean ok. Does it make the game that much better? How many people outside of Digital Foundry enthusiast types really care? How much would that cost to get there? Triple the amount? Are you selling 3x the copies? This already looks pretty good, even relative to real life. 

Resolution itself doesn't actually increase budget costs.
I could grab a PC game from 1998 and run it at 16k resolution with the press of a simple button, it's development budget would probably be comparable to an indie game today.

It's making all the high quality assets that costs money... And it doesn't matter if it's 720P, 1080P, 4k or 8k, we aren't photo-realistic at any resolution yet.

We need better developer tools and technologies to streamline game development... And things are improving there.
I.E. Ray Tracing removes the burden from artists to make baked lighting/shadow and let the graphics engine handle it in real time and dynamically, that actually can save money outside of cutscenes which require specific light and shadow placement to obtain a certain look.