I'm guessing good game play to you is complex systems working together to make a game work? Complexity doesn't automatically equal a better game or product. For example, I had hell lot of fun with Dragon Age 3 and Shadow of Mordor because those games respected my time by streamlining the game play enough for me to get into the game, while also being very fun. Then I tried getting into Wasteland 2 and Divinty, and every aspect of the game play I found tedious and requiring way too much time investment before I could start having fun. I don't have that kind of time, and what time I do have, I want to spend more on having fun then reading walls of text and learning complex systems. Something like wasteland would have greatly benefited from a steamlined mode or something, where you don't miss 70% of time time (that's just ridiculous despite me putting big points in luck and coordination), and these games could do with some more guidance instead of watching you run around like an **hole trying to find a item to activate the next quest phase. So no, like many old gamers think, complex is not always better.

That's the main reason why most GOG games are low on my priority list.

Your point would hold water if there wasn't also such a huge jump in graphical fidelity between the PS1 and PS2.

The other problem is that PS2 games started taking into account widescreen HDTV support before the PS3 was a thing. Games as early as Soulcalibur 2 (2002) offered 480p progressive scan support, which will give you very similar results to a 480p image upscaled to 1080p on an HDTV. PS2 games were being designed for that kind of display hardware a good four years before the PS3 game out.

Well, given that I was playing PS3 games on a CRT TV through a SCART cable for about six months, I can safely say that, yes, even so, the difference was astonishing.

And I have a couple of cross-gen PS2/PS3 games where I can draw comparisons between the two gens: Call of Duty 3, The Golden Compass and Tony Hawk's Project 8. The then-new technologies like real-time shadowing, specular lighting and HDR made a night-and-day difference. Not forgetting HD resolutions of course, if you were playing on an HDTV.

Of course, there were various software implementations of specular lighting and a vague approximation of HDR in some games on the PS2, but they never came close to the generation following it. I think 24: The Game really was the only game that came anywhere close to looking anything like a PS3 title.

The differences between PS3 and PS4 are somewhat more subtle. The physical-based rendering that is mainly defining the "look" of many current-gen titles is actually easily achievable on PS3 and 360 (last-gen Metal Gear Solid 5 uses it), it's just rather expensive on system resources.

Other than that, the main differences really between PS3 and PS4 are slightly higher framebuffer resolutions, slightly higher texture resolutions, a greater focus on 60fps, slightly higher draw distances, slightly more refined particle effects - the new consoles basically deliver the power to do stuff that the last gen could already do but which was rarely advisable due to resource constraints.

It's a telling thing that Quantic Dream's "Kara" tech demo used technology that was developed and demoed for a PS3 but hasn't actually been implemented in games until a gen later.

No, not especially. Way to miss my point.

It really doesn't work that way. Making good gameplay is not just a matter of putting time and money into it and when a AAA game looks fantastic but plays like shit it's not something that can just be explained with a wrong focus of time and resources or something. Nine women can't deliver a baby in one month.

No, my point was more that amazing graphics take a lot of work and therefore money but they don't particularly make a good game.
I'm not saying we should have an 80 person dev team all focussing on gameplay, I'm saying that having a team that big is a waste of money and the idea of having good gameplay seems to be forgotten about when throwing people and money at some pointless ideal of graphics.
My point was precisely that too many cooks spoil the broth, but the reason we have too many cooks in the first place is because of the 'graphics race'. The AAA developers have managed to trap themselves in a war where they're worried their game will look ridiculous and outdated if they don't spend an atrocious amount of money on graphics. It's mostly their fault though for creating this expectation in the general public anyway.

That's not ASCII. This is ASCII.

The development time on Thomas Was Alone was spent more on trying to make the game somehow artistically valuable than create good gameplay, which is the major problem with much of the indie market - many indie developers try to appeal to sentiment more than an actual desire for good gameplay. Sentiments like rose-tinted nostalgia, anti-capitalism (as in "death to AAA, let's make a game that's the very anti-thesis to AAA"), and the desire to be taken seriously as an artform.

Don't get me wrong, Thomas Was Alone was a robust platformer, but when you strip away the clever narrative and much-talked-about societal subtexts, all you're left with is an extremely simplistic platformer with extremely simplistic mechanics.

The indie market hasn't really offered up any compelling gameplay concepts in about five years - even Braid with its hugely pretentious storyline found a way to weave the storyline into interesting gameplay.

Totally agree. I recall watching TotalBiscuit as he was talking about the game, and he was heavily annoyed that somehow the narrator and the game made him care about these colored blocks by giving them personality; Course he loved the game but how under detailed they were vs how well the game/narrative was made was insane.

Sorta the same level of Stanley Parable where there's no enemies or moving AI or anything, the Narrator just talks to you based on what decisions you made.

Thomas Was Alone proved you didn't need much for graphics, or gameplay, as long as it was unique and the player was having fun.

On the other end i played the TIS-100 game which gives you 10 instructions and lots of small interconnected parts to do a task. Without music the game would have probably sucked, but i put on some beautiful background music and loved my experience, while the story was interesting as well. I almost wish i could program the chips and connect them together and make a computer based on my own work using it... But alas no.

I agree that graphics quality at some point in future may saturate and that other aspects of gameplay are equally important and have got comparatively less attention. But as it is graphics is important for many users and the current high end PC hardware is much more capable than the current console hardware.

Does it make any reason to actually buy high end PC hardware or if consoles are holding back development for highend PC hardware?

Sure one cannot expect the jumps in quality in graphics that were happening in the past but still one can still improve graphics quality (for example wind and weather and hair and facial expressions in RPGs) and people are asking why this is not happening.

The essential question is: Is it not happening because it's impossible or because consoles are holding back PCs because of their limited capabilities?

This question is quite independent from the question into which part of the game to invest the money. It's not as if console games would have extremely good physics or AI either.

When it is the days of old where consoles display blocky characters on the TV screen, I will easily say yes, the graphics get into the way of my enjoyment of the games.
Yes Console is holding graphics back.

Fast forward to PS4 era, where there is still room for improvement, the PC version does not offer much difference in Graphics that I can enjoy my games more.
No, Console does not hold graphics back.

Then fast forward to the Virtual Reality Goggles that take immersion to a whole new level, that current console don't have to power to support.
Yes again, console is holding back graphic.

I think that physics and AI are a part of graphics if you boil it down. Photorealistic visuals are very dependent on modeling the real world - but any cursory examination of such games would quickly reveal flaws. Be it rainfall, flora, destructibility, or how creatures interact with the world, I have yet to encounter a photorealistic game that hasn't entered the uncanny valley.

To me, focusing on AI and physics won't only improve gameplay, but would also offer a less saturated angle to approach graphics.

Formerly: "Good old Games"
Now: "Grumpy old Gamers" (confirmed by JudasIscariot)

Hey, you're only as old as you feel. Youth is a state of mind. :)