I start more and more to have a problem with this mentality that evolution of the gaming medium is all about always having more power.Because all that power eventually ends up in one field : graphics. And all these more advanced and more realistic graphics usually require better engines and even more work from development teams, which in turn put even more financial stress on studios, who then shy away from anything that’s even remotely risky in fear of not selling enough copies.

I understand the race for performance, from a business point of view, as no one would like to have their competitors out there with a much more powerful platform, but that business aspect affects the medium as a whole, and I don’t think for the better.

We’ve been doing the same games, more or less, since a couple of generations already. Only bigger, and with an updated coat of paint. Nothing against that in particular, but I don’t think this is advancing games as a medium. To me, it feels like if the movie industry ended up being all about the gear used to create movies and to watch movies (in other words, the hardware), with movies in themselves not being really important.

I admit though, that without context, Yoshida’s quote is hard to comment on. But nevertheless, that’s how I see things on the hardware front. I love games. Hardware to me is like my LP player, my Blu-Ray player, a TV, my phone, tablet or other. It’s mostly about the content, not the player. And power doesn’t really correlate to how great games end up to be, like a better Blu-Ray player doesn’t make a horrible movie a better one, and a better turntable won’t make a guitarist sounds like he have improved guitar-playing skills.