Coming up on a full year since the release of the Series X and PlayStation 5, off the top of my head I can only name three games which actually push the hardware: the "Demon's Souls" remake, the latest "Ratchet & Clank" title, and "Flight Simulator". The hardware is there, and the tooling is there, so what's the holdup?

Budgets.

In our current texture mapped polygon-focused industry, making a game which looks like the aforementioned three titles is so preposterously expensive-- I've heard industry execs float "two hundred million dollars"-- that the new systems will need massive install bases to make these new breed of games feasible. And the games won't be taking many innovation-focused risks in their designs either.

Imagine Christmas of 1990, and all the Genesis can run are Master System games, still with PSG audio, but with a few more colors on screen.

I'm wondering if hardware will follow the same pattern: we will wind up with a limit on computing power not based on the inevitable silicon density constraints, as commonly thought, but based instead on financial constraints? As in, the economics of building and running a fabrication facility capable of creating cutting edge hardware will only make sense under the most specific of circumstances?