There are still a huge number of people that only have 7th gen hardware or a Wii, so there is plenty of room to wow them and bring them to 8th gen.

Crytek's games are just advertisements for the Cryengine. They should just quit masquerading as a developer and focus on making their engine more accessible, cost effective, and powerful.

That's a really awful picture though. The point it's trying to make is valid, but it's poorly represented. This was a post in reply to it a few months back:

It's also worth remembering that graphics tech isn't entirely linear. As time goes on we "max" certain avenues of improvement, but at the same time we create/gain access to new avenues. I'd personally like to see lighting become to the 8th/9th gen what polygons were to the 5th and 6th. Incredibly demanding area of graphics though.

Good one. The point is (which you also agree), graphics dont make a game good. Innovative ideas make a game good. Problem is good game with good ideas are hard to find. And mediocore developers like cryteck likes to push graphics because they have forgotten what innovation is.

Good Gameplay makes a game good.

Fun well designed gameplay will destroy Innovation every single time. And Innovation is only positive half the time.

Crytek had financial problems because they emplyed almost 750+ people across 8 locations, making them the worlds largest independant developer as far as I know and over 2.5X bigger than Valve by headcount. They also had at least 4 new games in development at onece (Homefront 2,  Arena of Fate, The Collectables, Hunt: Horrors of the Gilded Age) 3 of which they were funding mostly by themselves. They also had the PC port of Ryse (100% self funded) and ongoing support for Warface going on. On top of that they do a lot of military sim and architectural demos. They were too damn big and were working on far to many projects at once for a studio that didn't want to give up their IPs (aparently MS wanted the Ryse IP if the were going to fund Ryse 2) especially given their last 3 major games have each sold less than the last.

It's not. P.T. wowed me with graphics, and it's just a corridor.

If only there was another way of making gamers happy than dangling a pair of 4k keys infront of them while they mash A .... dang nope I can't think of it.

Ryse didn't suck because of the graphics Crytek.

That's one of the definition of a good game. I don't really care so much about gameplay myself, if it's playable it's good enough to serve a great art, story, dialogues, characters, and impressive scenes. For example, Resident Evil is improving in term of gameplay (you can do more and more easily), has never been about "fun", but it's a dying serie because of everything else. And to say it clearly, in my case, I prefer to play Clive Barkley's Jericho with its shitty gameplay (because I will remember forever a few scenes where I really felt deeply impressed in term of atmosphere and design), than any game perfect gameplay wise where I feel emptiness and conservatism in term of art, design, story (I mean, Mario).