Ya the rate of hardware change is certainly a problem and the cost of trying to keep up has been ramping up steadily for the past 5 years or so. It really got bad when they convinced gamers that they didn't need 1 700$ video card, but 2 or 3 700$ video cards. For me its almost gotten to the point where I'm better off not bothering with the new stuff. Heck I got enough games to last me the rest of my life if I fully played them out. Most of the new games aren't much better then what came before, just usualy prettier (ok some are more detailed in the non graphical sense yes).
Now stardock... I don't you can use them as a fair comparison for the rest of the video game industry. You can't compare a 4x game to any other kind of game other then to another 4x. The needs and demands are totaly different. Thats why you can't apply stardocks development model onto those other game types as it wouldn't work or sell. As virtualy all the other ones need decent 3d graphics in addition to everything else.
Otherwise I agree, developers need to back off the bleeding edge some. I meen look at Crysis, is there a system even now that can run that game maxed out at a reasonable (30fps) framerate? And what is the return for all that power? a game that looks somewhat better then Far Cry... The return for the effort sucks and is getting smaller and smaller imho.
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