You may be onto something Kazz
Games like GTA4 are just proof of how uneconomical it is to truly make a masterpiece game on the HD consoles.
Is GTA4 the best game ever made? Possibly, but at what cost? Was it worth the Risk of nearly bankrupting Take2? Was it worth forcing the developer to put out far less AAA games a year due to the sheer amount of resources just to make one? When more and more focus in put on less and less games, you get exponentially smaller game libraries over the course of the generation and more risk placed on the developers as well as smaller returns in terms of profits. Instead of a generation of new games, expect a generation of almost exclusively sequels.
Gaming is becomming a dangerous venture, developers are taking less and less risks resulting in more and more mediocre titles. Take DMC4 for example, a game which doesn't trust you to actually play it the first two hours or so, instead forcing you to watch beautiful cutscene battles that you wish you were playing, but aren't. The Game was made for the reviewers, not the gamers. Your typical reviewer will play the first couple hours of DMC4 see how pretty it is and be starved just enough of any actual gameplay to not really be able to hold anything against it. You need only reach the half way point in DMC4 to see that they only made half a game and copied the first half backwards on the end of it to finish the adventure, I mean you literally play back through the first half of the game towards the end. Take Uncharted for example as well, a good game, but a timid game, Uncharted is perhaps the safest attempt at blending successful done-to-death elements from other games and media pushing nothing new or unique what-so-ever in itself. Unless of course being able to kill every minority in the world is your definition of innovation and even then it would appear that RE5 threatens to usurp that title. As the Escapists put it, this game pushes the envelope about as much as if I had set that same envelope infront of a glacier.
While games like MGS4 and GTA4 rise above this, both have financially jepordized if not nearly bankrupted their respective development companies just to do what games like these could have done last generation for a realistic cost. HD gaming thus far has punished Artistic vision and a refusal to cut corners while showing no sign of becomming anymore economical or efficient anytime soon.
I know its well known I'm not a fan of HD gaming at this point in time, but if you think there is not a sizeable volume of valid truth in what I've just written then enjoy the present and ignore the dark clouds grouping over the horizon. Is the Wii's ideal of gaming perfect? Hell no. Things aren't ideal for the Wii either, but they're at least working in some rationale sense of what economics should be.
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