And "high end games" is what? Fancy effects that can make a $700 GPU sweat? I hate developers use pretty graphics as a form of turd polishing. I hate consumers (gamers) even more for buying into it. In olden times, developers had to be careful and creative when making games due to hardware limitations. Now they don't have to worry about that anymore. And poor optimisation is the result of that. They can run rampant with sequel-itis and rehashes if they just add a fresh coat of paint over it. At some point, all those AAA 3D first-person RPGs and fan-service JRPGs start blurring together.
Don't get me wrong. Hardware power is nice. It lets us have stuff like arcade-perfect ports (remember how this used to be an issue?). But after a certain point, all that power doesn't contribute to a better game or at best it suffers from massive diminishing returns. Simple AI in video games back then was a limitation of limited CPU cycles. Now that we have CPUs that can perform several orders of magnitude more calculations per second, do we have better AI in games? All that RAM (yay for 64-bit programs) sits mostly used when developers would've killed for even a fraction of it a decade ago. GPU is the only thing that seems to have continued increased utilisation and it's for what? Higher resolutions, more anti-aliasing, soft shadows, reflections, and higher frame rates? Granted, that last one may have noticeable impact for online 3D twitch-based games, but the rest do not for most games. Yeah, it helps with immersion but again up to a certain point. For example, going from no shadows to simple shadows is probably the biggest leap. Moving further up to more accurate shadows become much smaller leaps. And I doubt going from 1600x1200 to 2560x1440 makes something like Diablo III a much better game. You can see more, but it's more of a luxury. It's also stuck in a loop; get a better monitor -> need a better GPU to take advantage of it, get a better GPU -> need a better monitor to take advantage of it. Both which ignore that unless developers make higher resolution textures to accompany that, the resolution bump doesn't result in as much image quality gain.