IMO, all these new electronic gadgets are coming out far too soon and too often. The old ones are just fine and the new ones aren't significantly better. They're also very expensive. It's really sad (even despicable) how quickly consumers are expected to just toss out their older possessions for the 'latest, greatest' POS.
I'm guessing it's a case of getting way more money out of far fewer users. Unsure how else continued console development could be explained unless they're really expecting to recapture former console glory days.
The rapid release cycle is probably contributing significantly toward developers being unable to take full-advantage of the hardware. Games don't really seem properly optimized, and the framerates in many latest-gen games is shockingly low. I remember playing... I think it was MGS4
(whatever one had the weird jiggling-boob Asian women... or I guess that's pretty much all of them) on PS4, and the FPS was regularly and noticeably low, which seemed so bizarre to me - and for a console to have stuttering video on a game made specifically for it and supposedly tested. I'm not really sure when "it usually doesn't stutter and plays above 15FPS more often than not" became acceptable for consoles. Meanwhile, if you looked at, say, Final Fantasy 7 vs Final Fantasy 9 for PSX, the tweaks and optimizations are really kind of shocking - that they were both made for the same system with the same specs. -Or you could look at early games for Amiga 1200 and then look at Payback, which is so well-rendered on such antiquated hardware, it's unbelievable.
Burning Rubber (1993, Amiga)
^Is that a compact station wagon?
Xtreme Racing (1995, Amiga)
Payback (2001, Amiga)
Final Fantasy 7 (1997, PSX)
^That tree shadow... I don't even (fun fact: FF7 was the most expensive game ever produced at the time)
Final Fantasy 9 (2000, PSX)
