As video games develop more and more over the years, companies have been making them more and more realistic-looking. I can guess this is related to expectations, but am I the only one who doesn’t care about graphics? We could be using the same processing power to store worlds that have as much exploration potential as the Earth itself if we weren’t afraid to save on processing power by going back to 8-bit.
That’s not how game design works. The people who work on the gameplay and level design and dialog are not the same people who work on the graphics. Sure, making the game prettier takes more time, but it has no effect on how long the rest of the game takes to be built. And lower-quality assets can be used in the interim for things like scripting animations, with higher quality assets swapped in later.
Sure, the same people can’t work on the different aspects, but budget for more designers who spend longer making more detailed graphics could be spent on other departments that do affect gameplay.
You could hire more game devs if that money wasn’t spent on excessive prettiness.
And keep in mind, there’s as much cost in an organization for management overhead, if not more.