A factual presentation of the decline in gaming

[Rai]

Bear in mind that development costs themselves have likely skyrocketed, as well.

Remember the N64/PSone era, where any large areas (usually) needed distance fog to really exist. Then the next-gen (last-gen now) pops up, in the form of the 'Cube, the Xbox, and PS2. Large areas were easily rendered, and game worlds could be fully realized. Now in our current gen, where we're spoiled on being able to fully realize entire game worlds with ease, what then? Graphics. Simply because there's nothing else that can be done.

The N64/PSOne era was a paradigm shift in and of itself because of the proliferation of true 3D, while the black, purple, black-green boxes brought in high-quality 3D, and processing power comparable to the typical user PC.

Can you name a single current-gen console title that wouldn't have been possible, gameplay-wise, in the last generation? I sure as hell can't.

So, Mister Developer, your game fulfills every desire you had for it, what next? Well, the only avenue left to really go down is graphics. Now, I'm not railing against graphics in any way, but with how detailed graphics are getting these days, the developer will have to spend more and more time on those graphics, making sure that they're not falling behind the competition, who is also striving to make the framerate chug with their high-quality texture mapping.

So, with greater graphical power means greater focus on graphics. But every man-hour spent on perfecting graphics is another man-hour that isn't spent on perfecting gameplay.