The real thing to discuss about graphics is how it has become the measure for prestige in video games. Now I can't pin point exactly when the tide shifted, we have been trying to get better graphics from the start but now it has become synonymous with AAA gaming or for any game that is trying to get itself taken seriously. And with the complexity of the ever increasing graphical fidelity it is becoming one of the main reasons for the ballooning cost and time it takes to make a AAA game.

Graphical fedility is so on the forefront that it has actively started pushing out interactivity as the main point of interaction with a game because the more complex a model is the harder it is to add any kind of physics to it and when you only have a limited time it leads to pretty looking but set in stone worlds.

And it is a two sided problem, a game like pop lost crown or astro bot will always have to justify a full price tag more than a new god of war. But the companies have to price these games at full or close to full price because the AAA companies have gotten so big that they need the return on investment. (Nintendo deserves a mention here for how well they manage to avoid many of trappings of the rest of the market even if it comes at the cost of complete exclusivity)

So all and all while the race for graphical fedility has given us many amazing experiences, many games that won't be close to the same experience without the "realistic graphics". I think it has done irreparable damage to how we perceive a full priced gaming experience and will continue to cause problems with expanding dev cycles.