By that I mean, those were the last consoles where performance improvements delivered truly new experiences, where the hardware mattered.
Today, any game you make for a modern system is a game you could have made for the PS3/Xbox 360 or perhaps something slightly more powerful.
Certainly there have been experiences that use new capabilities that you can’t literally put on those consoles, but they aren’t really “more” in the same way that a PS2 offered “more” than the PlayStation.
I think in that sense, there will be some kind of bubble. All the companies that thought that AI would eventually get good enough to suit their use case will eventually be disappointed and quit their investment. The use cases where AI makes sense will stick around.
It’s kind of like how we used to have pipe dreams of certain kinds of gameplay experiences that never materialized. With our new hardware power we thought that maybe we could someday play games with endless universes of rich content. But now that we are there, we see games like Starfield prove that dream to be something of a farce.