Certain genres I'll agree with you, but I'll give a few examples

First person shooters in the late 90s do more than you can do in the current gen of FPS and are better.  Unreal Tournament, Quake 2.

What about Warcraft style strategy games.  Age of Empires 2, Warcraft 2, Warcraft 3, etc.  For games that play alike, there's nothing this gen that really compares to these games.

Platformers.  New Super Mario Bros U is lackluster compared to a lot of past games.  Little Big Planet 2 is better, but even it's not as good as many older titles, and it's not just "a few all time classics," it's a lot of classic games that are better.

RPGs.  2002 saw the release of Morrowind, and while I think of this as an action/adventure more than an RPG, you can't really say that Oblivion is much different.  Skyrim has additional features but what's different other than graphics?  The SNES and PSX have many RPGs that are better than current gen titles even though graphics are better and you could potentially get more ideas across. 

Simulation racers, open world racers, and arcade racers.  Aside from open world games and simulation racers, racers in the past are comparable to this last gen racers.  Need For Speed Hot Pursuit 2 on the PS2 is better than Criterion's Hot Pursuit.

The next gen can perform more and potentially push out a better quality of game, but does it always happen?  No.  I've seen more classic titles or games that could have been developed on classic consoles than last gen games in the VGChartz 2013 top 50.

While I appreciate the point you're making -- that launch titles aren't always reflective of the greatness to come -- I would disagree with the implications of the graphs, i.e., that games are getting better generation-over-generation and that launch titles are of lower quality than titles released at the end of the previous generation.

Platforms can, and have, launched with some of their best games. Look at SNES, N64, Dreamcast, and the original Xbox.

But, again, I agree that we shouldn't judge the PS4 and Xbox One only by their launch titles. Or any other system for that matter.

What kind of cookie?

A diet one. He is such a brilliant guy, he needs to keep that brain with vitamins!

+1

@kupomogli and veknoid: While I think you both make great points and I agree that there definitely are past games that in certain areas put games of nowadays to shame, I'm seeing this from a much more general standpoint.

Basically what I mean is that at the launch of a generation the games that are exclusive to that generation are generally worse than the games that are at this point available for the last generation (of course I know that there have been exceptions to that rule), but at the end of a generation the games will generally be better than the games of the past generation. I'm not talking about specific games, just about the average game quality and if we try to keep nostalgia out of the equation, then that is not something that is very hard to agree with I think(...hope )

Better than most posts I see here and it is actually true xD Games will get better as time goes on.

So simple, yet so perfect.

Definitely. Next gen so far looks disappointing because it's so early. The prefect reason to stay on current generation just a bit longer