And besides... you contradicted yourself anyway. If your claim of games are made to be run at the peak of their hardware is true, this means that more resources have to be made and more code has to be written for this to happen. (This would be a "simple truth" of development.) And earlier you said that the increased power of the platform would not raise development costs, because they have more room to work in. But how is this possible if games are made to run at the peak fo their hardware? It's not. derp.
I don't know what you do for a living, but you're obviously not a developer or a manager. If you really want to know my qualifications on speaking for this matter I'll be pompous and list them.
I was reffering to compiling one and exactly the same piece of code for two different platforms, not the general meanders of coding. Optimizing takes alot of time and creates unnecessary costs.
As I said before, it's not the fact that "better hardware" produces issues with programming and thus becomes more tedious - having more and more advanced code being programmed is a natural occourence and has little to do with hardware advancements - programmers would've released revisions upon revisions of their code making it better and better overtime regardless of whether or not the console or PC they're programming for is a powerhorse or not - it's just that HAVING those resources is better than not having them at all. If you purposely try to misread what I wrote, then yes, you may treat that as a fallacy. Unfortunatelly it's not - you're touching an unrelated issue.
EDIT: If people shared the ridiculous opinion of "y'know what? I think we have enough advancements in technology, we should stop creating newer, better hardware" eventually we'd hit a wall where nothing "better", "bigger", "more complex" can be created. Humans naturaly feel a drive towards progress and programmers
desire more and more resources to make their ideas come true. If you're trying to blatantly say "Noes, that's not how it works" then you're making yourself look silly.
It's not the hardware itself that dictates the production costs, but the ambition of the creators, artists and studios. The hardware only enables (or doesn't) them to make what they imagined come true. You have to see a distinction between a direct consequence (same code can be compiled with less optimizations) and an indirect consequence (more advanced code and more content can be included).
