It's interesting to see people "catching up" to me: "where are all of the mind blowing experiences which couldn't have been done on earlier hardware?"

The only example I can even think of is the new "Microsoft Flight Simulator", where the game has the entire world modelled, thanks to "Bing Maps"-- not only did we not have "Bing Maps" in the 80s or 90s, but the processing power to parse that data just wasn't there. This is the kind of thing the hobby needs a lot more of.

Unfortunately, I don't see it happening.

There is a dichotomous split right now between "triple-A" and everyone else. To make a polished game which pushes today's hardware even just in the graphical sense costs hundreds of millions of dollars. With that kind of budget, the only game that can realistically be made is the kind of mass-market, Hollywood-movie style walking simulator-- because those sell!

In triple-A, the budgets are too big, and so they can't innovate.

Then there are the non-triple-A people: the bedroom pixel art "indie" hipsters, and the mid-range guys, like Yu Suzuki with "Shenmue III", or the people behind "The Outer Worlds", or the guys who made "MechWarrior 5". And in those cases, the budgets aren't big enough to push new boundaries! By the time they've created their crazy high resolution models and textures, and put together all of the levels in "UnrealEd" or "Unity", their entire ten or twenty million dollar budget is gone.

In non-triple-A, the budgets are too small, and so they can't innovate.

"But like Goldilocks, couldn't a game come along with just the right budget?" I don't think so, because of the way games are intrinsically financed; "Kickstarter" is only going to get you to the "mid-range" at best-- then as soon as you move to "corporate board room", publicly-traded company territory, you've burst into "triple-A" territory.

In other words, this "split" happened naturally and organically due to physical realities-- not randomly. And I don't see at the moment how those "physical realities" are not basic constants, versus things which will change over time.