And thats the thing that some tech industries like gaming get pinched the most.... it's always got to be better. So all those big budget safe and boring games have to be based on a certain minimum level of production values or else gamers will say..... "this sucks it looks like last gen." No wonder so many game makers prefer inching up. If they blow gamers away, then the minimum threshold of graphics and quality just got higher for the next game.
In other industries, customers like better quality products and such but for a lot of shit as long as it's good enough like bags of cookies or a pair of jeans they dont really get amped up expecting better like tech gadgets and software that evolves. Even for some techie gadgets like toasters and clock radios, nobody has expectations it'll evolve like a PC specs or a game.
But it is something gaming does to itself. They are the ones promoting Unreal Engine, CGI trailers, bigger open worlds than last game etc.... So they are putting those expectations into gamers minds too. Back in the day, nobody expected games to have a million MP modes or have so many games be open world or have tons of cut scenes and professional actors. But game makers added those costly features. So gamers expect it.
I feel like Japan lost a whole decade of gaming because they tried to do it their own way, using their own engines and they weren't fully prepared for the ramp up to HD and then to 4K.
Where you see some real success is from Capcom with their RE engine, but pretty much every other non-Nintendo Japanese company has largely failed with few exceptions like FromSoftware, though their games aren't technical marvels.
Had Japan adopted Unreal Engine sooner, maybe we wouldn't have seen such a fall in the prevalence of Japanese games, but on the other hand they would have felt more same-y.
I think the evolution of consoles becoming more PC-like really helped western developers more, especially since they could port their games to a PC market, which hasn't been as historically desired in Japan until again fairly recently.
You saw some Western developers strike out on their own like CDPR who got a massive advantage over Japanese studios, but they've also recently given up their engine.
I wonder if Naughty Dog is running into similar problems. I think we've seen the extent of Sony's studios using their own engines and not really evolving much this generation. Their most impressive game largely uses a new engine for Demon's Souls, but we've also seen that Bluepoint hasn't put anything out since.