Better game consoles mean fewer games?

Methinks Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, et al., are about to discover the law of diminishing returns. Apparently, the more complex they build their game consoles, the more complex the job is to program for them. Supposedly, the polygons needed for character creation was in the hundreds range for the first generation of consoles, bumped to the thousands in the current, and will possibly leap to the hundreds of thousands as the next iteration of consoles appear by 2006.

At this point, creating a top-rate game can cost as much as $5 million. Experts in that area estimate that number can easily triple, leaving many game manufacturers unable to compete.