Play "Beyond: Two Souls" and you will have your answer.

it helps with immersion of course if it's at the expense of gameplay it's not worth it. Personally I love more unique artistic takes like Puppeteer but variety is the spice of life and I also thoroughly enjoyed Beyond Two Souls for its immersive graphics and gameplay.

I get what you're saying.  I just wanted to point out one thing.  Christian Bale was actually so committed to being an authentic Batman that he DID fly through the air in a bullet-proof Bat-Suit.  He also had his parents killed just to channel the pain of Bruce Wayne.

From the developers standpoint - Because it's the easiest thing to hype gamers for. Zero imagination or talent required and almost unobtainable, so it can be used for years and years.

Gamers standpoint - Because plenty of them would pay for an alternate reality where they're actually cool.

The point of it is the core reason why many people play videogames. To escape this world and have a look at a different world. Just imagine a fantasy world with realistic visuals. We could explore new worlds that are different than this world. That's why we build rockets and giant telescopes.
But in this regard photorealism has to be coupled with virtual reality. Without that we will never truly achieve immersion.

Another day, another hipster on the internet. 

People spend ages trying to figure how complex aspects within society and the mind work. If you truly can't understand why an art style such as photorealism is popular, then you can't be very smart.

But hey let's think about something let's say um... That tomorrow all the developers in the world agree that photorealism is dumb, and decide to never use that art style again. That's sounds pretty unlikely, and honestly a little retarded. Well that's what this thread insinuates...

The pictures from quantum break are not graphics its real life footage made with actors. Photorealism is making games more intense imagine the horror game you play is indistiguishable from real life it would be way more intense. Photorealism also means a certain kind of physics animation and lighting level that can be used in games with their own artstyle. Its the hardest to achieve and therefor the holy grail in graphics. If we achieve photorealism we can do anything on a screen. Graphics will just be limited by the imagination of the developer and this is the ultimate goal.

There's is really no reason to single out photorealism here, in the world of gaming it's simply an artistic choice. If your goal is to create a realistic game it's quite natural to try and pursue a visual style as close to reality as possible.

Outside of gaming it's value increases significantly though.

Because photorealism is max graphics spectrum. It works well with a lot of genres/games and no matter the graphics, it's still a game that can have anything happen in it; not just real life stuff. And besides, porn.

Honestly I prefer CGI to real life.
As in the Crysis 3 shot, there are certain things that just cannot be achieved in reality, but they look so awesome.
For example lighting or better colours. In motion it looks even sweeter.