For the brocoli tops and illiterates [tl;dr] technological advancements and (((wider audiances))) allowed creatives to be less creative
Before non-whites and false females entered the mainstream and john normal man was the customer of products games were beginning to look worse. That just accelerated it. See the real reason things look worse is because there are less limitations and less imagination in humans. Behold my low poly room where every single angle and mesh has to pull massive weight so there is enough substance where the viewer can fill in the blanks with their minds eye. Where fidelity is a sinful word that attacks passion and style for mere shallow replications. Where inferior lighting techniques rape specs that could have been better utilized in computational power for more advanced and divergent artificial intelligence and complex story progression flags that allow you to weave your experience around them instead of merely following each node with no variation. Technology has and never will be an issue for video games, but the so called creatives that use it tend to only get more and more soulless as technology carries more of their work.
>pic unrelated it makes my cock hard