Yeah, except you're sorta missing the issue: What is the low end hardware you'll support.
How many ships/characters do you plan on having on screen?
How deep can the AI be?
That is secondary, more often than not. Good design, whatever it is (it doesn't need to be games) ask "what do I want to do?" first and "how am I gonna do it?" second. Otherwise you have design made by programmers, and that's usually a terrible idea. There are exceptions, but trust me, designers drive the programmers, not the other way around. I know this because I'm a programmer. If it were up to me, all my sites would be simple and straightforward, full of ready-made animations and geeky sparkles and tweaks. Is that what the client wants? No. Is that what is needed? No. So the client tells the designer what is need, the designer thinks of what it's going to be, and my team programs it. Are there too many elements and slower PCs can't handle it? Tough luck, my team will find a way to deal with it.
Same for games. Do you need advanced AI for thousands of troops at the same time? Programmers to the rescue.
And when all is said and done, if the game needs an i7 to run properly, so be it. That's what minimum requirements are for.
You have your low end ( graphic ) target and your middle end target that you hope to run well on. All of the geeks on AT that have $350 video cards? Rarely targeted. You can't have your graphics engineers spending all their time doing work for small percentage of users when you need the game to work well on the majority.
I agree with you, but many game companies don't, or didn't up until recently. It is not uncommon to see very taxing games released. Far Cry 4 and AC Unity lately, but there are dozens of them each year.
What I'm saying is: the industry is not affected by the disparity of system specs PC gamers have. It is a non-issue 90% of the time, and the other 10%, well, people will just buy a better PC if that's what it takes. It's what PC gamers have been doing for two decades or more. And it's not changing.
Of course, if you're building B quality games, you're not targeting $350 video card owners... so you can code in Unity and everyone has a similar, middle-of-the-road experience.
Exactly. But let me just say that B-rate games aren't necessarily lower quality games. On PC at least. You have plenty of B-rate games that are immensely good and/or popular. Minecraft, for example. Wasteland 2, for example, is my personal game of the year, and its graphics are nothing to write home about. They are 2005-level graphics, by any standard. And the game is absolutely awesome.
There's a neat phenomenon called profit margin. If you spend less money developing, you will be able to actually earn a bigger slice of the game's sales. Spending 100 million on a game that ends up selling 3 million units is a disaster. And 3 million in sales is terrific, by all accounts. On the other end, spending a couple million on a game that ends up selling 200 or 300 thousand, which is a fairly average amount for any game (even terrible ones usually sell more than 50k), will yield a bigger profit.
And then you have companies like Blizzard doing AAA games that are specially optimized for low-end hardware, even if their games aren't B-rate.