But the GTA V that people play today is not the version from 13 years ago for PS3 and Xbox 360.

We are on the third-generation of GTA V with the enhanced edition that only came out on PC last year, and Xbox/PS5 4 years ago. The latest version has 18x the pixels per second (9x resolution, 2x frame rate), and far more detailed models and textures than the Xbox 360/PS3 version.

It has been profitable for Rockstar to keep remaking the game with better and better visuals specifically because consumers are demanding it.

I could be wrong, but my personal impression is that much like on HN, it's the enthusiasts who are quite into niche stuff like indie games and bemoan the graphics race, where as the silent mass of "average" gamers are more like "oh man, the new Call of Duty has even better graphics! I can't imagine playing the old one anymore."

The average gamer is buying Fifa and Cod every year, but that doesn't mean it's because of the graphics. I'm not convinced that a change in graphic fidelity had any meaningful impact in their sales for the last few years.

The big problem with AAA studios is that they are basically just investment vehicles, and they are big investment vehicles. So, only big successes matter, and they can only get big successes by trying to go all out and pray to become the next big thing. Moderate success is not enough. Huge returns on investment on small investment is not enough. They have to spend tens/hundreds of millions and return billions. Once they get a success, they have to milk it.

They are getting eaten by Roblox and dozens of indie developers eating up customer time and accepting more moderate success (Huge success for a small studio, negligible for a large one).

And more accurately, the average gamer (by market spend) is only playing mobile games.

> I don't think many consumers (outside of hardcore games) could tell the difference between the graphics of a game from 10 years ago to the graphics from a game of today

My half blind aunt could probably tell the difference between the graphics of a game from 2016 and 2026 if you put them side by side.

Were video game graphics "good enough" for a while now? I’d say yes, with the exception of vr. But to say there has been no noticeable improvement over the last 10 years is silly.

GTA 6 is coming out soon. I’d invite you to actually compare the visuals of gta 6 vs the original gta 5 from 2014 that was released for ps4 (rather than the 2022 enhanced version for consoles or 2015 version for pc which shouldn’t be compared to non-pc gta 6, since 6 for pc will also get a significant facelift).