World of WarCraft is probably the best example of this effect. If they'd gone for realism, the game would've looked dated within a year or two, and had its popularity drop a lot faster.

But the cartoony style let them keep going with just minor updates to the graphics for more than a decade. That decision must've made them at least a billion dollars over the last 10 or so years.

While I kind of think WoW looks pretty dated these days I would otherwise agree. When WoW was released it was alongside Everquest 2, which was poised to be the next big thing with realistic graphics and a name everyone recognized in MMOs (though people certainly recognized Warcraft as well). I would be surprised if anyone even really remembers Everquest 2 at this point, but for a good year or so we talked about which one would win out. WoW beat it and proceeded to beat every MMO record ever by several orders of magnitude.

I played both, and I remember talking loudly and often about how much better WoW looked despite having a fraction of the system reqs. WoW vanilla could be run on a potato - I think I had it going on a pentium 2 with a third hand graphics card...

I remember thinking at the time "wow, the characters look like ass". I think the character models look worse than Final Fantasy X, which was a game with good art direction and miniscule polycount that came out in 2001.

I agree about the problems of pursuing photorealism, but I think Doom 3 actually holds up well, particularly the lighting and environments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28mn_fJlmbo

The 2005 Doom was a movie....

[EDIT: Yes I know the post above has been edited to fix/clarify, no I can't delete this post.]

They likely meant the one that came out in late 2004, Doom 3.

Which actually did come out in 2005 for the Xbox, according to the Wikipedia article for it.