I think the aims are lost these days. we had great games before that focused on gameplay over graphics but now that seems to be changing.
worse than graphics conc v gameplay conc is that now games are getting released faster and with more bugs. check out black ops 2 for example. even skidrow couldn't do it.
we had games like Caesar 3 that ran on a pc with NO graphics drivers and yet its my fav city building game. pes was a master piece in the early days of ps2 then has become just milking.
I think the devs should rethink how they develop games and make it easier for themselves to do so rather than put more burden on themselves.
Computers are there to make life easier and automatic and not harder and more detailed through manual work.
I want to say that the increasing cost of games is not just graphics. Nowadays games are almost held to a similar standard of movies.
Take a game like Super Mario Bros. and think what you needed on that team. People for graphics, people for level design, people for music and SFX. Can't think of much else there.
Now take a game like Mass Effect. What do you need for that? Writers, damn talented professional writers for that matter, not to mention you have to writer for three possible outcomes in many situations. A movie is about 2 hours of storytelling roughly, a game like Mass Effect can be upwards of 20+ hours of storytelling. You need voice actors. Most of the people you hire are professionals who do this for a living, you can't pay Joe Schmo off the street to voice Shepard for $100. You need larger music teams, even entire orchestras for the soundtrack, or you need to pay to license music (M4 Part II has been around before the first Mass Effect and was done by Faunts). Of course there's graphics too, which are definitely more complicated than Super Mario Bros. blocks. It's not just a few pixels, it's entire 3D models, large and diverse 3D environments, weapons, abilities, animations, and physics.
To assume that game costs are rising became "omigod people only care about graphics" is a poor assumption. Game costs are rising because game development is growing. You look at a AAA game nowadays and it has everything going for it. A game like Mass Effect has large amounts of storytelling, gameplay, solid graphics (first game is a bit dated looking plus all the graphical glitches, texture pop-ins, and slowdowns don't help but the third game is excellent looking), voice acting, well composed music. You take away a lot of these things and you basically get an indie game.
There were tons of bugs back in the day too. At least nowadays bugs can be patched. Imagine back in the day, buying an awesome looking game, only for it to be a buggy mess. When you do that today, you go "That sucks" and wait a few days for a patch to fix it all. Back then, too fucking bad.
Plus I can go on and on about how graphics are important to games but I've explained this a few times. In short, graphics add a level of immersion and character to a game that can, at times, overshadow even the gameplay and make a game worth playing.
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