Re: Is TV nowadays sad or what?
Basically you said exactly what I'm saying, and then disagreed with it.
See, that's all they're doing is coming out with newer better versions. Look at the best games you mentioned--Doom 3, Half-Life 2, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2--they're all sequels! No one can think of a decent idea anymore, so they merely append onto what they already have.
And to think that the PC's graphics are behind the consoles is a proposterous idea. PC graphics have always been ahead of the consoles. The Xbox 360 is only introducing hi-def, which is something like 1080x720; PC monitors can already get much higher than that resolution today.
Technology is improving quickly, you're right, but what do you mean by "movie-quality games?" We already have games that mimic movies, and they suck. And resolution-wise, games are already ahead of movies.
And Microsoft/Nintendo/Sony can "shoot new versions of their consoles every 5 years," but who's to say that consumers won't get tired of spending hundreds of dollars to upgrade all the time? When the DVD format first came out, consumers embraced it because it was new, compact, convenient, cheap, and high-quality. VHS won out in the VHS-Beta wars because VHS was more easily rewritable, cheaper, and held more data than Beta, even though Beta had better quality. That leads one to believe that consumers could completely reject high definitions discs, because this time, the revolution isn't for the consumers, but rather because the DVD industry is dead. There's no money in it anymore. We have fast 16x discs; we have rewritable; we have dual-sided; we have dual-layer, they can't do anything else.
They can release as many consoles as they want, but that doesn't mean consumers will continue to embrace them. They have to keep making new consoles so they can have better graphics, so they can put out Doom 589, which is basically the same as Doom 3, except the graphics are improved.
Consumers like to brag about quality, but how many of them really notice a substantial difference?
And won't people eventually get tired of the same old games, except with improved graphics?