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Has the Console Arms Race Stalled?
An article at Eurogamer argues that even with a successor to the Wii on the horizon, the console arms race we've watched over the past few decades is in the process of changing dramatically, with base hardware taking a back seat to software and peripherals.
"Even the most basic yardstick for console improvements has become a little hard to read. It used to seem like a reliable idea that every five years or so, consoles would catch up to the PC — a platform which sees advancements every few weeks — and remain competitive for a while, before the PC's cutting-edge accelerated away. ... However, the upgrade cycle appears to have slowed considerably — with games that actually demand cutting-edge systems being few and far between, and core gamers far more likely to continue happily playing on two-, three- or even four-year-old PCs than they were in the past. ... If not a halt to progress, this is certainly a slowing — and probably one which is welcomed in most quarters. Consumers love improvements in graphical quality, but most would probably prefer to see any major increase in development budget being spent elsewhere — more detailed content, more expansive storytelling, more progress in areas that have been neglected in the former headlong rush to cram more polygons and effects onto every screen."
Yes it has.
I for one have never really seen the point behind spending thousands of (pounds/dollars) on a gaming pc capable of playing the latest games, only to be surpassed within a few months. As things currently stand, it's actually opening PC gaming to a far wider audience as the price of an adequate gaming rig is quite reasonable. Also, i'd rather have longer and better games than I would slightly better looking ones. And even still, games with modding support can often receive graphical boosts down the line anyway.
It's not really saying that the console arms race has stalled, but is instead saying that the graphics arms race has stalled, which is probably true, and that efforts are shifting, which is also probably true.
After all, just as dpi in printers stopped being a selling point once they all got "good enough", and just as megapixels are becoming increasingly irrelevant as a differentiating factor between cameras, so too are the graphics in today's games reaching a point where the return isn't worth the investment for the developers. Graphics are already "realistic enough" for most people, and trying to move things closer to photorealistic gameplay is probably not worth it, since the return they get is minimal, while the effort required is exorbitant. Instead, spending it on improved gameplay or other elements is a better return on their investment.
Games like Minecraft doing so well just hammers that point home.
Graphics and shiny things lure people into a game but it is the storytelling and immersion that keeps them playing. Maybe for AAA shooter titles that doesnt matter, because they have your money. For other games with more DLC or say MMO's with subscriptions, thats important.
They need give software a chance to catch up. Hardware is not the limiting factor anymore. It doesn’t take much crappy programming to trip you up when you are trying to render billions of pixels consistently within a small window of time, throwing in some network latency for good measure.
The Nintendo Wii and various versions of the handheld DS have outsold everything else so powerfully that companies are now forced to rethink their previous strategy of better hardware = better console. Given those factors and that the casual and 'family' gaming market has vastly overshadowed every other demographic and It's easy to see how the entire gaming landscape has changed since the PS2/XBOX/Gamecube generation. One rather bad downside to this trend is that shovelware is surging in this current generation, and has caused me to even stop buying games for my Wii. It's all obscure JRPG nonsense or movie games / shovelware. I haven't played my Wii in several months and do not plan to anytime soon, if I can smuggle it away from the GF I will probably sell it off cheap to a family who eats that crap right up. In case you couldn't tell I'm a PC gamer, which seems to be the only remaining platform for deep and intricate games. Even this is slowly withered by everything now having to be tailored for both the PC and consoles which usually leaves the PC port with the short end of the stick.
In terms of the graphics race, I think the next big thing to hit consoles(or gaming in general) would be Real-Time RayTracing. Consoles typically have specialized hardware(although they seem to be heading towards general-purpose these days), so a specialized RTRT chip wouldn't be out of the question if it were cheap enough and fast enough. Things like Caustic Graphics OpenRL come to mind.
Graphics aside, it's no secret that there's been a big change from a mantra of "quality, quality, quality" to "content, content, content"... and non-related content at that. A PlayStation did one thing - it played video games. The PS3 can do nearly everything... even function as a computer if you don't upgrade the firmware.
In prior years, it would take you at LEAST a week to finish a campaign on any respectable video game. These days, you can finish a video game completely in two days. Then spend five more days fiddling with the "bonus content". If they spent more time developing a good story as opposed to unlockables, that race may accelerate again. Developers aren't struggling to use the processing power they have at their disposal. There's no reason for innovation at this particular time.
We need to get back to a time where developing solid and expansive CORE content -- not extras -- was what mattered.
The Wii's successor is rumored to have more horsepower than the Xbox 360/PS3, so it's not like the arm's race is over. Sony and MS simply realized that hardware improvements that have been made possible in the past 6 years don't translate to drastically better graphics sufficient to get people to buy a new console yet. Also, Sony isn't looking forward to selling another $800 machine priced at $599.
It's easy to forget that 2 console generations ago, consoles output at 320x240 resolution. Now, console games can run at higher resolutions than many computer monitors. The obvious quality improvements that come with increased resolution aren't going to come again in the near future.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
... one of the real issues is risk aversion and title stagnation. Every modern game has to cater to the lowest common denominator due to game budgets, in a way the lust for pretty graphics has caused game developers to reduce the game aspect of games and simplify games to such an extent they become little more then stale worlds of aesthetically pleasing art. It's been a long time since I've seen game (not a movie or movie game as I like to call them) based on _just_ the idea of the game rather then going for the special fx and bling. Take the latest L.A. Noire, the more graphical horsepower has increased the less the focus is traditional games and more on cinematic experiences and IMHO that is a negative thing since the more passive games become the less interested I am.
It's one of the reason I can't stand modern "RPG's" there is barely any participation left because the action gaming mechanics have been ripped out of them to make sure people who don't like participating in their games can watch and run through the content. This is bad because it alienates what many of us got into gaming for in the first place - to participate rather then be pushed through content on a conveyor belt of automated-combat. FF12 takes the cake in what I consider the devolution of games where all you have to do is navigate once you set your auto-battle. At that point why even bother "gaming"? Why not just a walkthrough on youtube of someone else playing and get the same experience for $0 money down?
Consoles never catch up with the PC ... Especially the xbox .. Its made up of sub par components barely adequate for a low powered server. the Sony gizmo is a little better, but its so hard to program, even Prof BrainBox starts to cry. And dont get me started on the Wii , outdated two years BEFORE it went on sale. Wii 2 will be a bit better.
Graphics look amazing. Crysis on high-res looks like you could open the TV screen and pick a leaf off a tree. But the immersion factor of the gorgeous graphics breaks down when you try to play with them. When you shoot a car windscreen, and it doesn't break. Or shoot the tyres, and they don't pop. Or the gas tank and it doesn't explode.
Even sillier - shoot your AI squadmates in the head, and they just go "Ow, quit it!". Worse, you have a magic gun that won't let you pull the trigger if you're pointing it at a non-enemy. I played the opening level on Halo Reach, and was so bored when I got to the first farmer, that I just shot him in the head to shut him up so I could get on with alien-killing. Well, the gun went bang, and a blood-spatter hit the wall behind him, but he never missed a word of exposition. I shot him 10 times - the same thing happened. On the 11th shot, I just died. Up until then, my teammates hadn't seemed concerned about my actions, and they didn't actually take offence, just some mighty vengeful god struck me down until I agreed to play nice.
Or the world looks open and inviting, but you're just as much on rails as if you were playing some arcade light-gun game. Like Bad Company 2, where any deviation from the set path gets you a 5-second countdown to insta-death. Or Gears of War, where you're a grotesquely-muscled space marine who can be forced from his chosen path by three chairs piled on a table.
The thing is, many games have got bits of it right. Just Cause 2 gives you an enormous world, and near-total freedom within that world. Heavy Rain changes the gameplay based on your actions. The Witcher makes every choice have a consequence you might not like, but at least you get to make the choice. Modern hardware has the power to create incredible, immersive game experiences, but a lot of studios would rather make Big Guns, Shiny Metal 5 using a well-established engine because that's easier, cheaper, and practically guaranteed to sell to their target demographic.
Maybe the next arms race will be environment engines that come a little closer to replicating the properties of objects, so that glass always breaks, wood and cloth always burn, and you don't need the red key if you've got the rocket launcher.
Beyond increasing core counts (which appears mostly useless for most gaming engines beyond a couple), nothing much is doing in the world of CPUs these days.
I remember choosing between a 486 @ 25MHz versus 50MHz for an extra several hundred bucks. That's twice the clock speed within a single CPU generation for those who are keeping track.
A generation later I purchased a Pentium 75MHz, and 18 months after that upgraded it to 233MHz. That's triple the clock speed.
I even remember having a 400MHz Pentium (II I believe) and about a year later upgraded to a 1GHz P3. That's 2.5 times, not to mention the greater efficiency per clock of a P3 vs a P2.
I now sit with a nearly *5 year old* dual core 2.4GHz CPU (overclocked to 3.3GHz mind you) and I can't find even a $1000 CPU that will give me anywhere near a worthwhile performance bump for anything other than super specific parallelizable applications like scientific computations or workstation-style 3D rendering.
This transistor efficiency stall has also hit the GPU market in the past few years. Have a look at how much Nvidia or AMD have pushed top end GPU performance in the past couple years. They're making incremental 15-20% bumps per generation -- that's nothing like back in the TNT/3dfx days when you could count on a 50-100% framerate jump with each successive generation.
Consoles are stalled because GPU/CPU technology is stalled. If CPUs and GPUs were were keeping up with the previous pace from the 90s, we'd have software/games that pushed those limits.
At least it's slowed down because many games are developed with consoles in mind, tacking on a port to the PC in the last minute and therefore coming nowhere near what a PC game could look like.
Shitty controls on the PC (e.g., Dead Space, Prototype, Star Wars: Force Unleashed) are just an extra bonus because someone simply tried to map the gamepad buttons to the keyboard.
and core gamers far more likely to continue happily playing on two-, three- or even four-year-old PCs than they were in the past....
What? People played starcraft for ten years! What about Diablo 2? Warcraft 3? Age of Empires? All these have in common two things: First, they're from related genres, which just comes to show my ignorance on other genres. Second, they have really strong multiplayer, which adds replayability far beyond that provided by a good story.
Hardware is becoming more powerful than the software requires most of the time that it throws the development prices up too high.
And in the case of PS3, the size of the disc is more than enough space for your average games. (but this has the advantage of intelligent data mirroring to improve loads)
Not to mention this recession has been making a huge dent in everything for a while now.
Hopefully this will wake up developers of all areas to better ways to manage project spending, better techniques to develop in their specific areas and not be as wasteful. Oh, and not cheap out too much and have to pay millions to cover the screw-up later on. (Looking at you, Microsoft)
Many developers are waking up to the small-scale games market (finally) and throwing out some nice, simple, small games that are actually really fun to play.
I wish more of them would do this.
I'd give anything for some classic-style RPG games up there, it is the perfect marketplace for them.
Come on Square Enix, you should be doing this!
All of these factors have some contribution.
And in my personal opinion, I think it is a good thing.
Software is easier to update than hardware. And you don't need to deal with compatibility problems as often, either.
Look at the different versions of hardware with 360 and PS3, that has confused the hell out of people as it is.
3 visible versions should be the only thing people should have to care about at the most. A basic version, a standard version, and a premium version. There should be no in-betweens that people should have to care about. It should just work.
As for the PC industry. Digital Platforms like Steam, GfW, those are keeping gaming afloat. More and more indie developers are flocking to these platforms since it is accepted as pretty fair DRM methods for the services it offers and has a decent number of users.
As these platforms grow, the more your average PC users join it. These are people who just barely know about PC hardware as it is. They aren't going to be going out every year buying new hardware just to play the latest greatest games that don't exist.
That "don't exist" part, too, came from the recession. The latter half of the decade slowed down considerably.
Games Developers are trying to target as many people as possible now. This means gimping the engine to play on lower end platforms. This is a wrong approach, but it is the cheapest approach since PC industry still deals with a lot of piracy too. They can't be spending time making the game scale perfectly from a netbook to a near-super computer without losing a huge amount of money if they game bombs. It is way too risky.
My last upgrade was in '07. I intended then that I would've upgraded by now, but it hasn't been necessary. Then again, I'm a gamer who's finding more value in the classics, including emulated classics, than in "Arkham Asylum" or whatever the latest blockbuster was.
The power you have from your dual core and graphics card, can now be had for half the electricity bill, probably less. True, if they could, they'd double performance and have you choose which one you wanted, but they did find a place where they could improve.
It may not mean much to you, but here, in Europe, we have significant taxes on electricity and it can save you US$100/month if you just turn off one of those heavy computers of yours. I used to have a few servers running in the meter closet for firewalling and fileserving. Right now, I have a WRTG for firewalling and a popcorn with a USB drive for files. This has taken my electricity bill down by over US$1000 per year.
Although I agree that game development has stalled and hardly uses the extra RAM and cores, I do think they will do so in the future. The better the physics models of the cars you emulate are, the longer you'll want to play the game. The more variation in any form of AI, the more fun you'll have playing. Running things like physics models or AI on separate cores will eventually make game play better. It's just a matter of time before game companies figure that out. Regarding revenue, I think WoW has figured out how to keep on making money from a game that essentially isn't that special.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
It used to seem like a reliable idea that every five years or so, consoles would catch up to the PC
Well, that's a mistaken idea.
Assuming they mean meaningless specs-man-ship, I've had a 1600x1200 monitor on my desk since the late 90s or so... Not sure which console in the early 00s "caught up" to that.
Assuming they mean variety of gameplay, where's my hex strategic wargames? My non-arcade flight sims? Assuming we start the console era around 1980, that means they're about 30 years late?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The console arms race has stalled largely because the economy has stalled. Developing a console, investing in manufacturing facilities etc. is quite an expensive process, one that a company really doesn't want to go through unless they feel that they will be able to sell the console as well as a large number of games for it. In this economy, it's going to be very hard for people to rationalize plopping down $500 or $600 for a new console. Furthermore, since console hardware capabilities are (relatively) fixed, by the time the economy picks up again your competitor will be able to utilize the latest and greatest technology to come out with a console that is better than yours, and you will be stuck like that for the entire life cycle of the console. So there is actually a rather large disincentive to release a new console at this point. The risk to reward ratio is simply too great.
Monstar L
Check out the best selling game for this week... Yes, an Indie game.
I used to be one of those kids who enjoy tuning their computers and upgrading RAM and graphic cards every year, but now I don't really have any reason to do that anymore. I spend my gaming time playing indie games like Terraria, Minecraft, or, recently, AI War
Of course it's not really indie games' fault for the whole race slowing down, but you know there is something wrong when you are more satisfied by games made by one or two guys than by those made by big studios. (ok, nothing particularly wrong with that, actually, but whatever)
I think console gaming has been coming really shit lately mainly with Microsoft tainting it with the PC gaming mentality. It's now more acceptable to release shit in a broken state, we get less variety and more sequels. I think MS and Sony relied far too much on pushing the limits with hardware and need to keep their consoles around longer to help everyone recoupe their costs.
I don't think it's that impressive that MS is breaking compatibility for a a new disc format. I appreciate that they will replace the console for free but why should I go without a console for days or weeks for a software update? If gaming is so expensive that they just can't afford to ship games on multiple discs then I think they're doing something wrong.
I think they're also unsure what to do because the next generation will yet again be even more expensive and they realised they got owned by the cheap outdated Wii and I wonder if they can even afford to let that happen again.
Nintendo's Wii may not have been as exciting technically but they did the right thing and they were right in that HD was unnecessary. Even a year or two ago the stats were saying most people did not use HD with their xbox 360.
I can't believe people are settling for the current generation's graphics when they could be so much better. Think about a Grand Theft Auto type of open world game with character models as good as a one-one-one fighting game, that would look amazing. It's not necessarily about photorealism - it's about pushing the boundaries of current technology.
And the new consoles should at least render games natively in 1080p. The current generation can't even do that with the vast majority of games: http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=46241 Indeed, most games render natively at 720p, when virtually no TV available does 720p natively. So you end up with a horribly stretched out picture with most displays.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
Yes, it has stalled. Bash development seems to be at a standstill, and csh has fallen off the face of the planet. Only Microsoft has done much recently with Powershell.
The exception is the Wii, which actually was in the black for each unit. Not surprisingly, it seems that Nintendo is going to be the first to release a next-generation console. Hopefully this will force MS/Sony to release new consoles as well to keep up.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
I'm still happy with my PS2. I have no interest in taking the chance of spending $300+ on a new console and game, when I have no confidence I'll find a game I like. After all, there are no returns once the packages are open...
This is the first really severe economic crash we've had in the "computing age". There has been small crashes in the past, but nothing of this sort of scale. It was bound to have some effect on development cycles, and certainly it has had an effect on consumer habits.
Don't forget, we also just came out of a crazy bad recession. This would have been a bad time to release a new console and it is harder for the companies to justify console development costs when investors are demanding cost cutting. Additionally, TSMC has been stuck for over a year on the 40 nm node. The cancellation of the 32 nm process may have impacted some of the plans of the console makers. If they were planning on a chip that simply wouldn't be feasible/economical without a die shrink, then now have to wait for 28 nm to become a widely available and high yielding process, but so far this process is not ready for production silicon. TSMC won't be able to produce the quantity or yield of parts that the console makers will need on 28 nm until at least early 2012.
With smartphones becoming the main computer for the general public (not the /. crowd of course) it's no surprise that phones will take over as the main game 'console' for consumers. Video Game companies are still coming to grip or flat out ignoring this reality and $1.99 games.
Exactly... it is because Microsoft and Sony spent a lot of money getting their consoles to be great where as Nintendo wanted an interactive console. Microsoft and Sony are now reaping the benefits of having a next-gen console and more games that are finally coming out. They are playing the long-con(release a next-gen console, and wait for money to trickle in from game sales), where as Nintendo went with interactivity instead of graphics, reducing their hardware cost and overall cost as a result, playing the short-con (maximum sales in the shortest amount of time). This and their interactive console shot up game sales as many kids, and some adults went out to buy the interactive games. Microsoft and Sony have no need to upgrade, but Nintendo needs to upgrade their consoles because they are getting killed on the graphics front(hell the Wii doesn't even have a dvd player). Oh and others are right, there has been no real upgrades in any CPUs or GPUs for a while now. They just add more without making what we have faster which is what would really help especially on games.
However, I do not agree that Sony and Microsoft will have to release a new console... there is no reason for them to, and even if the Wii2 or whatever they are gunna call it gets HD graphics finally, they still have nothing on either console. Think about it, the Connect and the Sony Move gave them the interactivity that the Wii had over them, what else do they need? Nintendo is just trying to keep up
And that's a good thing.
Can we get some new RPG from LucasArt now? Something as good as Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle?
I think with enough power under the hood it really comes down to the games. But with many third party games going multi-platform then this boils down to first party titles.
Aside from the occasional must-have exclusive title, Its the large studios that make games that everyone wants to play. They know this, so they publish for anything and everything with a controller. To do this, they'll include enough game content to satisfy the lowest common denominator. A recent title that felt this sting is Rockstar's new baby "LA Noire." According to an interview with Bondi Games developers the title fit on 6 discs at one point. It has been compressed to 3 discs, so I wonder what was left on the cutting room floor aside from things mentioned in that article.
Im not a content developer, nor do I play one on slashdot. I'd imagine that the methods to put discs on differ between platforms, and the storage medium affects things like compression. More storage means more content, right?
Windows handles high resolutions perfectly, you just handle windows poorly. You need to increase you monitor's DPI setting.
Go ahead. Set your PC's density to 160 DPI to match your monitor and viewing distance. And watch applications whose developers have never thoroughly tested them at any density other than 96 DPI break.
Thankfully it seems we are getting a resurgence of the "shareware" era, this time via steam and the download channels of the xbox360 and ps3.
Xbox 360 I'll grant you because it has Xbox Live Indie Games. But where is the form to sign up for SCEA's PLAYSTATION 3 developer program? http://www.tpr.scea.com, the developer relations site that this press release cites, hasn't been responding for over a month now.
I played the opening level on Halo Reach, and was so bored when I got to the first farmer, that I just shot him in the head to shut him up so I could get on with alien-killing. Well, the gun went bang, and a blood-spatter hit the wall behind him, but he never missed a word of exposition.
That could be considered one of the acceptable breaks from reality, designed to keep players from finding themselves in an unwinnable situation and abandoning not only the game but also other games from the same developer or publisher. Sierra's reputation for allowing the player to unknowingly create unwinnable situations soured a lot of gamers to the entire adventure game genre.
Also, bugs that eat saves definitely kill any interest I have in finishing a game.
Does this include games specifically programmed to automatically save continuously, including a save after your character has died?
But when a game is developed for a gamepad, there is no reason to remove gamepad support just because it is on PC.
Other than that the publisher wants to sell one copy per person rather than one copy per household. A lot of PC games don't have any support for a shared-screen multiplayer mode (which need not be split in all genres), and a lot of console games built around shared-screen multiplayer (especially one that isn't split) don't get ported to PC at all. They don't care that you have a TV monitor and four Xbox 360 gamepads hooked up to your PC; they want to sell two to four copies of the game instead of just one.
Games cost a lot to develop. The asset modelling alone is very laborious, and producers can't get away with reusing assets like they used to for stretching campaigns.
Even dialogue audio is expected to be professionally acted, or reviews suffer. And games require a huge amount of testing.
This all adds up the costs, which would be even larger when a new hardware gen comes out, but nobody wants to pay more for games. Many complain endlessly about today's prices.
So we get what we're prepared to pay for and no more. That's business.
CUDA is nice because it is supported by a lot of video editing and encoding programs and speeds up video processing. However, you are not limited, with a desktop system, to either/or. You can install graphics cards from both vendors. In fact my desktop system has a high end Nvidia card for gaming and video processing, conneced to dual monitors, and a low end ATI video card for HDI output to my HD TV.
They weren't adding MHz and resolution for shits and giggles, they were doing it because it enabled better games. For example, the creators of Sonic might have had that idea back in the TRS-80 days, but been unable to implement it. Likewise, the creators of quake or Daytona USA may have thought about those ideas back during the Genesis time and not been able to implement it on the available hardware.
Today, what ideas are there for game software that can't be implemented because of hardware? I mean *maybe* the frames per second will be lower than they want, or the detail will be less than they want, but basically there is nothing that can't be implemented. Now people have been adding all sorts of new controllers, which is frankly more interesting, as it allows new ideas.
The problem in the game industry has been the opposite - lack of creativity. Every year, another stupid set of the same damn sports games from last year gets updated with new sprites and sells again for $60 a pop to gullible people. If you like sports, freaking go outside and play them yourself. Every year, 10 new first person shooters that are almost like last year's first person shooters get released. This isn't a new problem (witness the number of side-scrollers), but it has gotten worse.
The hardware will get better when it needs to. Right now, there's not much need.
Estimates are that the Wii 2 should be able to beat the PS3 graphics and still stay in the black with a 200$ price tag. It won't be anything like the improvement of the theoretical PS4 over the PS3, but if they can bring in all the developers that don't want to make games for the wii because the wii has poor graphics it'll put a lot of pressure on MS and Sony to bring out a new console to steal those developers back.
Also, the Kinnect is utter shit.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
The PC upgrade cycle is a myth. You can play most if not all games with moderate settings even on a 5 year old pc. My friend tried out Crysis 2 on a dual-core and 8600GT (really?) and it did not stutter. The point I am trying to make is if you don't want to run all the games on MAX resolution and settings, you don't need to upgrade your PC as they claim. With consoles, you are stuck with lower graphics capability anyway. What you are missing is the opportunity to upgrade it if/when you can manage some cash. Maybe it feels good to know that no one else has better graphics than you.
Aside from the Wii, the current generation of consoles does a decent job of delivering 1080p HD content. It no longer takes a $1500 PC to game at HD resolution with playable frame rates. The question in my mind is when will display manufacturers start pushing 2K resolution as the next big thing, and how long will it take for prices to be on par with current 1080p displays. At that point there will be a compelling reason for the gaming masses to get excited and open their wallets once again.
Gameplay/playability is always more important than graphics. It has ALWAYS been the playability of a game that's made the big hits. The graphics are just an extra bonus. In fact most of the games that have a short playtime are the ones with the exceptionally great graphics. It's playability > graphics. With FPS's, the older ones were just as fun if not more fun than the most cutting edge ones. It's nice to have photorealistic graphics, but I know for a fact that CoD is no more fun for me than Unreal Tournament, and I've put way more hours into UT. Think about all the big epic hits over time, Sierra Quest series, Monkey Island, Zelda, Mario Bros, Sonic, Street Fighter 2, WoW etc, in almost all cases there are alternatives with better graphics but the gameplay/playability just aren't as good which is why they fell behind.
Gameplay/playability is always more important than graphics. It has ALWAYS been the playability of a game that's made the big hits.
Its not an either or, both graphics and gameplay go hand in hand. Almost all big successes in gaming history have been enabled due to advances in graphics that could then be utilized for new gameplay. You couldn't have done Mario64 on a SNES or Zelda:OOT, Doom on 286 wouldn't have been much fun either, FinalFantasyVII without CD, that wouldn't have worked, and games like Monkey Island or Maniac Mansion where one of the graphically most impressive titles of their times (full bitmap background instead of tilemaps, large sprites, sprite scaling, etc.).
And of course the fun part: CoD isn't graphical powerhouse, in fact most people by now call that engine kind of outdated, instead the engine is optimized for playability, instead of shiny graphics effects you get 60fps and super smooth controls. I still consider it a shitty game, but certainly not because they didn't spend a lot of time fine tuning the core gameplay.
Would you prefer to play as James Bond or as an anonymous CIA desk jockey?
You mean Casino Royale (2006) era James Bond? Imagine a game where you start as a desk jockey and end up of the same nature as James Bond. The player creates an CIA or SIS desk jockey character who goes through various training exercises and intelligence gathering missions, with the end goal being promotion to a rank given the authority to use deadly force (the "license to kill" represented by 00 in the Bond universe).
Problem is the era of gameplay is over, one can see this in MMO's where there is pracitcally zero participation (it's all automated) and you have yuck yucks signing up in the millions (For world of warcraft).
I agree gameplay > graphics but the last generation graphics has started to overtake gameplay, you can especially see this in many JRPG's that have horrible battle systems. All the money is being sucked up by the graphics, I hated FF12 because they practically gutted the game of any 'gameplay' to speak of, when you tick on autobattle and hit "forward' to navigate, while your bot does the rest... at that point we've stopped gaming and have moved into the story/watcher era, where the vast majority prefer watching passive movie content to playing games.... FF12 is absolute proof that this is going on whether we like it or not.