Developers don't care about frame rate. Consumers don't care about frame rate. Even reviewers don't care about frame rate. It doesn't sell games and developers shouldn't waste time pursuing it until the hardware available doesn't offer an either or proposition of frame rate or graphical output.
That's not how fixed hardware works my man.
Also, you are wrong. Everyone
cares about frame rate, it's just that many people don't realise or know exactly what that is, i explained this before.
Average Joe doesn't know what it is but i you cut the frame rate of CoD of FIFA in half, he will immediately tell the game is sluggish now. Most people don't know what antialiasing is either. But when you remove it they will see the jaggies. And yet, how many of consumers will care? And what about polygon counts? You think the average Joe will notice the difference if you cut the geometry in half in every game? And yet modern games have so much geometry that even if you have half of it the game would still look almost the same, unless you zoom in to details and look for sharp edges.
Basically, it's the same with every other visual aspect. You say consumers "don't care" about frame rate, do they care about anti-aliasing though? Or 4K? Or Ambient occlusion? Or poly counts? Or anisotropic filtering? You think they wouldn't buy a game if it had slightly lesser graphics or resolution but better frame rate? Seems like the opposite is happening.
Look at the games people play the most. Look at Fortnite and Minecraft. Look at all those mobile games casuals play with. You still think people care about graphics more than how responsive a game feels? On the contrary, responsiveness and smooth motion is even more important if you sell to the masses, have you ever seen a phone operating at 30fps? Doesn't matter if you aware about what "frame rate" is, you would still probably throw it out of the window in frustration.
Even worse, have you ever played a PC game using a mouse at 30fps? Nobody can stand it. I assume a VR game at 30fps would be intolerable as well. So i don't know why you ignore every market besides consoles, as if it applies to a tiny part of the population. It's only the console market where 30fps (or even lower) can be tolerated because the controllers themselves smooth out the inputs. You feel like you have good control but the games still have the reduced responsiveness and precision behind the filters. Plus, many games that are made with consoles in mind are usually slower paced, "cinematic", walking/climbing simulators with somewhat automated controls that don't even
need to be responsive.
Consumers care, Developers care (console devs only act differently because they mistakenly think the average Joe won't care) and reviewers who don't care simply suck at their job (which is true for most of them regardless). I do find it very interesting though, how you, personally, care so much about what the average consumer might think and how everyone should cater to their low standards.
I don't give a toss what makes money, nor what Joe Average thinks of the framerate in his annual sports and shooter franchises. I care about games feeling good to play.
I'm with you but wait... most of these games you mentioned run at 60fps anyway and
feel good to play. They feel better this way even for the average Joe regardless if he knows it or not. The Call of Duty franchise (that was the benchmark of big sales for decades) was always a 60fps series on consoles. Same with the Battlefield games. Same with FIFA, NBA2K and Pro Evolution.
So what's going on? It's almost as if better responsiveness
feels better to the majority. It's almost as if smoother running games were made for the masses all this time and 30fps console games cater to the "graphics whore" crowd.
