Fully agree.  The next big break through will be AI tools to bring costs down.  

As for graphical jumps, the biggest problem is it requires additional hardware to get a full benefit.  4k on a 32 inch TV doesn't do much, but means a lot on a 65 inch.  Ultra lighting on a standard LCD is meh, but on OLED it is glorious, same with shadows.  120 fps doesn't mean anything on a 60 hz TV, but is amazing on a 120 hz set.  I personally thought upgrading from LCD to OLED was (by itself) bigger than going from ps4 to ps4 pro.

Some games benefit from high end graphics like hogwarts and horizon.  Some don't need it like cocoon or triangle.

Prettiest game, imho, is still WWHD.  

AI if it's allowed to develop will probably just eventually destroy high end hardware period (consoles, PCs). Because it will completely change how games are rendered period and won't require polygons, textures, lighting, etc. any of that. It will just be fed a data set of enough reference photos and video that it will from that create photorealistic worlds/characters at dramatically less power overhead, so you'll have photorealistic visuals on a smartphone, even probably eventually displays (like smart TVs) built in. And people will then take that for granted. This discussion gets it:

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/after-sora-by-openai-aaa-games-by-ai-are-months-away.1667354/page-5#post-268975419

From the user side it will blur the line between what is "official" content released by actual companies, if there are AI tools that dramatically streamline the difficulty process of making games and allows a handful of people to do it (eventually just one person), you're going to have a flood of people sitting around making their own 3D version of A Link to the Past, making their own Smash Bros characters, making their own Elden Ring game, making GoldenEye 007 with photorealistic graphics and all the Bond actors, etc. etc. with visuals that are basically the same as the real version, even mimicking the physics and all that.

I think you're going to have a monstrous side market of games that look and play like official game content because of AI assistance on the development side, but it'll be created by users and hobbyists and "side hustle" content creators instead. 

There's no money in Tiktok, Youtube, Instagram Reels just being confined to traditional movie studios and television production companies, obviously the money is giving it out to the general public and letting them create their own content and share it. That will happen with AI games too, you're going to have teenagers flooding the market with multiple games running on a photo-real engine every month, hoping one of them becomes a viral hit, the same way today people make videos hoping one in a million of them go viral.

The less live service games, the more preservation it gets

Lol, SS:KtJL now has less people playing it than Marvel’s Avengers, the other failed, now dead live-service superhero mashup game.

But plz give us more of what we screamed from the top of LexCorp Tower we don’t want and voted with our wallets against on this game. After all, as Einstein once said, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

A 140 people playing the game.... its dead.

*edit:

I forgot when it launched..... it was feb. 2nd.
It hasn't even been a full 3 months yet.

I wonder how many millions they lost on this project.

*edit 2:
Someone on resetera wrote there might be more devs working on content patches for this game, than people playing it.
If your contractually bound to make said content, I guess you have too, but man must that suck.

Also this is just PC,.... theres probably another 100-200 people playing on console.
Its just, man, this must suck as a dev to have to do.

Im guessing the future content for this game, isn't going to be amasing, with tones of effort put in.
Im honestly hopeing its just a small skeletion crew, and the rest of the guys there are already put to work on something new.
Time to make another single player story driven game, instead of a online multiplayer GAAS game.
(if they do another GAAS and it flops, thats the stuff that kills studios)

*edit3:
This is what endgame looks like:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SuicideSquadGaming/comments/1bz085e/what_good_is_getting_to_a_mastery_level_this_high/

You cant see sh*t, its all just explosions and odd colour bursts..... all you can make out is the dark health bars, that are overlayed ontop of whatever effects are in the background.

LOL. Vampire Survivors is fun with such stuff, because it doesn't actually has much gameplay interaction between upgrades, so it doesn't matter you can't see shit. Does that mean Suicide Squad has as much relevant gameplay as Vampire Survivors? Hmm, I think I stay with Survivors, it does cost a lot less.

It really doesn't help that Rocksteady isn't even the same studio anymore. After this abomination arrived on the scene, people did some digging, finding out about SBI's involvement, the execs making bad calls, and people having left the project over the years. Currently there is barely anyone left at Rocksteady that made the Arkham games, because the majority were either pushed out by the new group & SBI, and others just didn't like where it was going and left for greener pastures.

At the end of the day, Rocksteady is yet another studio, much like Volition, where it is brand name only, no soul left inside the body of the original. To me this means Rocksteady is absolutely dead as a studio, because it has next to no one left that made the games I loved years ago. This is just another example of execs greed running unchecked, and also letting SBI in through the front door.