Yes, I think the new x3 layer drives will be around 30$ and I doubt they will go down in price over the years considering MS and Sony will be basically the only customers who buys them.
Between them, Sony and Microsoft's consoles will sell half as much as the entire existing standard Blu-ray market. I'm not sure that's insignificant...but I don't have any expertise in component pricing, so you could be correct.
Rise of the Tomb raider
Forza Horizon 2.
Cross gen games with excellent visuals.
ROTR doesn't match with
Ryse or
AC Unity or
Metro Redux, though. And its own successor that was not crossgen looked superior.
FH2 was a better match for
Forza 5, but it was also at half the framerate. It too is also put to shame by its nextgen-exclusive followups.
Titanfall ran at 792p and with an extremely uneven framerate, was also graphically outclassed by the games I already mentioned, and likewise by its nextgen sequel.
Note also that you had to specify a small number of individual games that were notable for their graphical prowess. That alone is an argument that crossgen holds back visuals, or else you could simply point to any crossgen game at all and it'd be basically on par with any nextgen exclusive.
We can't say they couldn't take infamous, cut down the geometry, remove post process effects like motion blur and SSR, claw back the draw distance, remove some objects like random trees, and massively cut down texture resolution to make it fit on the PS3.
Most people including me were saying the launch games didnt do anything special if you take resolution, graphics, framerate out of consideration.../
But you would only take those out of consideration if you were trying to redefine your way to winning an argument. "Just" lowered geometry, missing effects, less on screen, and less detail everywhere
results in a completely different game. Graphical changes alone are enough to say this, with rising justification as the number of changes goes up. It's simply perverse to treat these alterations as superfluous, when all evidence shows that audiences respond directly to them.
People may buy new-gen games solely out of desire for better graphics--that's why they say they do in polls, for example. And it's what we saw at the last gen launch, when 360 versions of software rapidly declined in volume in favor of Xbox One versions, at a pace greatly faster than the increase in new hardware installed base versus the old gen. Yes, crossgen games look better in their nextgen versions...but they also don't have the graphical chops of exclusive titles. That's how eye candy drove
Shadow Fall to sell millions and millions of copies, despite being a pretty mediocre game. (More tangential support for my argument is provided by the fact that devs often reach so hard for graphical excellence that performance suffers--Crytek made a whole career of this on console.)