Blablabla tldr - less money/profits in the gaming industry.
Everything is terrible and troubled now of course. Because without growth, what even is there?
(I didn’t read skimped through the article)
Just make games with older graphics; it’s cheaper, reduces visual bloat, and encourages player imagination to fill in the gaps, and investing xxx million dollars in a video game is dumb.
Seriously though, who asked for photorealistic graphics? If people agreed on a reasonable target, we could just have games at a reasonable size and cost, hardware upgrades wouldn’t need to be so insane, and teams could be put on other important things like, I dunno, making sure the game works instead of just looking pretty.
Do I need my games to have photorealistic graphics? No.
But there is something about the occasional game with such an impressive visual fidelity it makes you stop and go “wow, that is pretty”.
It doesn’t make up for poor gameplay, but played on top of good gameplay it does create an additional sense of wonder/amazement.
There are certainly cases where it helps. Ghost of Tsushima for example can really pull an emotional story because you can see the emotion on the characters.
