In 20 yeas I won’t care!

Depends on what you mean by realism. The best computers and CG artists in the world at Disney couldn't make a CGI Tarkin look real in Star Wars: Rogue One. I think there's just a block in the human brain on fake humans looking real other than brief glaces like face replacement in an action scene.

If you mean environments, we're probably damn near there. With ray tracing now and the best computers ever it's probably doable if you have the budget and time to create it. Problem is who has the budget and time to do it? Unreal Engine is already going down the route of using real life pictures and such to automatically convert that into game assets though, so maybe that will develop enough to do it profitably. Like how we automate so much open world creation now.

Anyway my main answer would be that it's a stupid desire and games look better when they are artistically designed like Dishonored.

Yeah true. But like i said i meant more for simulation games like hunting or flight sims or movie games. Rpgs i wouldnt like that way. Indie devs and some triple a studios will always pick their own artstyle and way

I think you can scratch PC from PC gaming. Devices will change a lot. In my opinion, photo-realism is only good for hidden object games. Unless, you add a touch of fantasy to the realism.

People have been saying this for many years, yet Elden Ring just sold better on PC than both consoles combined. I don't see an end to PC gaming as we know it coming anytime soon, unless the cloud streaming stuff really gets going.

Portable devices will take over. It seems that a lot of kids favor phones and tablets over PC. PC gaming will never die anytime soon indeed, but it will become niche. That's the way I imagine gaming in 20 years.

You could probably do that now... if you are willing to fork over the dough for say 800Mb/s lines. More than likely there will be the lower tier of internet for cheaper that's within reasonable price and that won't be 'insta-download'. And it won't be 5G either.

Drives i can work with, but at some point no matter how big it gets, it will still take forever to transfer the files. Also you start getting into 'all your eggs in one basket' scenario where you aren't doing backups like you should or having them on alternate media, then ZAP guess your drive is dead and everything you had on it too...

Personal preferences vary.

There is an inherent problem making fiction too real: the psychological effect. Some people have issues keeping a divide between reality and fiction when gaming already. But take any survival horror game and make it super-real. Throw on a VR headset. Now you tell me: is it a good idea to expose people to realistic horror they cannot look away from? In that moment when the fear kicks in and you sink into the game completely the divide of game and reality would be too thin imo. Lots and lots of heart attacks and other medical emergencies if you over-do things. A counter argument may be "we'll be used to it by then" which might have merit: play The Exorcist on even on VHS to someone from 100 years ago and watch them cower in terror. We sort of get born into technology - our great-great-grandchildren will likely laugh at something which freaked us out as kids.

There's also that same issue we have now of games hitting the market designed to look pretty, but offer little else in entertainment. That's not unique to games - films are doing this already - so it's an ongoing problem not one unique to ultra-real games.

I can guarantee though that in decades to come streaming the game will be the norm, and subscriptions will unfortunately be the only way to play. We won't have "super gaming PCs"; if we have desktop devices at all we'll have bog-standard consoles with most of the processing done off-site. Hell, the consoles themselves will likely be propriety-locked and rented only. And most people will be cool with it because society is already conditioned to buying access to things rather than owning/hosting it themselves. It's a brave new world.

Pfft. People have been saying that for a decade already... and mobile gaming has proven to be little else than being dominated by time-wasters and throwaway games. It's for distracted gaming and not much more.

20 years is a long time to predict, but standard gaming machines are extremely popular on Twitch and whatnot with the kiddos. My nephews and cousins mostly play stuff like Minecraft and Roblox on PC. I dunno... we shall see.

hope this wont be the case , only low iq prefers phones

I don't think it will ever go beyond Unreal 5 in my opinion, since it already looks too realistic for me. And besides, not all game developers wish to have their games photo-realistic in the first place.

That said, I also don't think that games will ever reach photorealism when it comes to graphics that are associated with gore and violence. For example, looking at the newer Mortal Kombat games, no matter how much the developers try to outdo themselves in the brutality of their characters' executions, they still have yet to make me want to vomit as compared to looking at the real thing. I just don't think it will ever reach to that point. Even if it did, maybe it would be followed by a regression to the older graphics since people will find it hard to play violent games without having to go to the bathroom to puke for every few minutes lol.

I don't think it works like that.

Even 10 years ago, games from 10 years ago could be considered photorealistic. If you look at them today, they're trash. Heck, I was blown away when I saw the Lord of the Rings movies, but if you watch them again today, you can easily see all the seams.

So...games have already achieved photorealism, and games will never achieve photorealism.

I very very very much hope that the innovation 20 years from now will be something more significant than "incrementally improved graphics".

When you are exposed to something enough you learn to see and tell what's real and what's not. I know a lot of movies today use CGI to do things like cars moving in the background and things that are more or less, not up front and center nor important. But too many movies have CGI and nothing looks real or has real impact.

Movies when CGI was new, using it sparingly, like a few places in Jurassic Park, and Terminator 2, while a lot of scenes also had practical effects as well as physical props.

Maybe they need to back off from CGI special effects for 20 years...