i'm worried about development cost.
That is one year job for 4 minutes. Sure, engine is pretty much ready, and maybe it took 4 months to produce, but it's still 4 minutes only
Now imagine a 6 hour game
Now imagine a 20 hour game
Now imagine skyrim looking like that
You hit a good point, and one that I am surprised more people are not talking about.
My prediction is lame, but it is that there will be more middleware. These are tools that are supported in various engines.
For example, if I am making a UE3 (engine) based game, I might use a middleware program like Speedtree. Speedtree allows you make thousands of different highly detailed trees, of all sorts, and with extreme ease, customize, extend, add more branches, make for different bark, wood, fit for different seasons.
This little program is of course a life saver. the man hours that are saved from your artists, modellers so on, just making trees are staggering. Now you can directly put trees into your game world and make them all look different.
Speedtree is highly used. You have played many games that have used that middleware. Now imagine what other middleware programs they can make for people?
Imagine a middleware program just for skyboxes.(real time!). Now you can just pop in as many suns, moons, and have it work snappy in your new engine.
It could be water, or people.
There are already tons of people-human-skeleton middleware to reduce the time it would take to make faces on generic characters.
But horror scenario; We all know how many UE3 games this generation looked the same? We might see even more of that in next gen.
It's a retarded analogy to compare but bare with me for no reason other than my own volition (I like saying that word, though I barely know what it means!) - In web development, a lot of people lost their jobs once they made easy-management tools on how to make a website. Suddenly a person can design a professional looking website (if they got artistic flair) with little/no coding.
I think we will see a similar trend in gaming. We will see more tools to reduce work load. more outsourcing, more middleware. More easy solutions. Because its the man hours that clock up the costs.