I think that's more of a sign of the fact that computer technology is kind of plateauing right now. For instance, back in the late-90s\early-2000s, CPU speeds started shooting up at rather dramatic rates, while I find it's much more incremental today.
I think it was around 2002 we got up to 3GHz, and then we stopped because we couldn't go any higher. Then we we're dealt 64-bit, PCIe, DDR technology, and then dual and quad cores, and all that lot combined with the lower power/lower priced/miniaturised stuff, has been the progress of the last 7 years.
The focus in games nowadays is all on 3D, and that's the domain of the gpu. It does the most of the hard work. So that's really where you should be judging the technology nowadays, no longer the cpu.
The whole entertainment industry has taken up a different approach this decade than how things were in the past. In the mid 1980s, it was groups of friends (or individuals), making games up often in their free time, getting them published and making a bit of money. Often it was a weekend hobby, and development time was in the order of a few weeks. In the late 80s/90s, those who could made a career out of it, by forming their software houses or being snapped up by the publishers who formed their own in house game dev teams.
With more resources and manpower, the quality of the products increased. We saw many well made and entertaining games in the 1990s.
Turn of the century, and the approach changed. The games industry had become a mass market. It was lucrative, but as hardware improved, games became more complex, and they required more man-hours to produce. So the investments of these businesses grew with the increasing development time, and games started to become higher risk. It was no longer a few thousands pounds at stake if a game flopped, but millions.
With mainstream appeal, their new customer base was now joe average. And advertisers know how to sell things to joe average. It's been doing that well for decades. And the advertising model used for movies had proven successful enough that it could be directly applied to games as well. So these economic risks could be reduced by intense advertising with sales tactics designed to seduce the masses. It's now about producing an occasional "blockbuster" game, and spreading enough rumours of how great it is, getting those rumours circulating amongst peer-groups, and people will believe it.
