Moore's Law. It represent our--consumers'--expectation of how fast computers will become as every year passes by. Because of it, the chip industry always scrambles to meet that expectation and is designed and built based on this law; the whole industry competes each other to meet this law, and rips profits from doing so.
Although this is a good thing--who doesn't want super fast computer at disposal?--recently the market has seen a phenomenon it has never seen before; because all of the processors, even the low-end models became sufficiently fast, people simply stopped opening wallets for fastest chips out there. While the chips grew by Moore's Law, software stayed relatively simple, and did not use much of the processing power today's models are capable of.* The Cutting-Edge, The Fastest lost its sexyback.
One market that hasn't seen this yet is the game industry. Because it is relatively young industry, it has seen crazy growth throughout its history, and still sees unbelievable speed of advancement--people that I know who hasn't realized how fast the games grow often tells me how amazing they look these days. Because people wants more, games keep pushing its limits, which in turn asks for more processing power.
Although games do have a lot to develop on currently, there certainly will come a time when gamers stops looking for prettier and more realistic games, simply because most if not all games look pretty and feel realistic enough. This will be the time when games takes another step towards realizing its potential, and starts experiementing to become more mature media as a whole. I hope CEOs and managements of game industry will look forward to and prepare for this day. I certainly can't wait to see this time to come.
*Microsoft's new OS, Vista, tries to push boundaries with it's new graphical interface and other gimmicks, but seems like that boundaries will remain still for awhile, as Vista's launch seem like a failed ignition--at least for now.
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