The ever-increasing power of our gaming hardware also made it possible for games machines to show us much more impressive visuals. It used to be that a couple of artists could create all the sprites needed to display a game, and maybe one sound engineer would sit in a soundproof room tweaking tinny audio files to sound more like real world sound effects. And that was usually sufficient. Nowadays, our gaming machines have a ravenous appetite for media, devouring gigabytes of sound, textures, video, and 3D models at a time, simply to show us what is going on in the game. And it’s for this reason, primarily, that I think we don’t get as many games as we used to.
The incredible cost of producing the games we’ve come to expect from modern hardware must be quite prohibitive. It’s hard to see how a small studio could compete in this day and age, and it seems like a lot of them have disbanded, their members leaving to join some of the big powerhouse studios to help them handle their enormous workloads – and there’s certainly plenty available.
It’s also a fact that the video game industry now makes more money per year than the film industry. [Depending on how you gauge it. -Ed.] Yep, it’s true. The games we’re getting these days are becoming much more comparable to big budget Hollywood movies too. Now, instead of just game designers on board, we suddenly need artists, directors, actors, lighting experts, cinematographers, choreographers, and animators (by which I mean hardcore, professional ones from the film industry). Some developers also need to hire composers and orchestras to create the theme music for their games. Cinematically impressive games like Grand Theft Auto IV and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune are prime examples of just how much the gap between videogames and movies is being bridged, and how much more seriously actors and directors are taking the videogame industry.
That leads me to another point: time. Given that videogame production now encompasses all of these moving parts, it must be an absolute nightmare to co-ordinate the development. I can imagine that the bigger studios have entire teams of producers and project managers to oversee the whole thing and ensure that every part of the development is kept on track. Seeing how developing a big budget game is such a costly affair, it must also be an incredibly risky venture – from a publishing standpoint. 
The publishers who back the development of these games must surely want to take every precaution they can to ensure that the multi-million dollar game they’re funding doesn’t turn into a complete flop and fail to make them their money back. I’m pretty sure that there is probably an ever-increasing focus on play-testing to ensure that games in development turn out well. Think about it: how often do we get a truly, truly terrible game nowadays compared to five years ago?
Wow – anyway, before I go on any more, that’s basically it. This is, in my opinion, where all the games have gone. All the developers have banded together to form armies of people who work hard to ensure that we get the games we expect nowadays. It’s far more expensive than it used to be, and creating all the media and content for the games takes a hell of a lot more time than it did a few years ago. So we’d best get used to waiting, because if we want games to get better, the waiting periods are only going to get longer.