In addition, there was an extremely rapid increase of PC specs in the 1990s, and you if you had a 3-4 year old PC you probably could not play those games. "The PC you really want always costs $3500" as a famous columnist said.
People bought bleeding-edge games to show off their conspicuous consumption. Everyone else played them years later. People like me would stay late and play Decent, Quake, Warcraft, etc (RCT was a trailing edge game) on our work computers, because we certainly didn't have those kinds of specs at home until much later.
Yea I stopped paying attention, but the last "show off" game I remember was Crysis in 2007. But at that point Valve games, Sims, and etc were very lower-end friendly.
The premise is just bizzare where OP thinks these bleeding-edge mind-blowing graphical games were somehow "efficient" and conservative in how they abused your hardware.
People bought bleeding-edge games to show off their conspicuous consumption. Everyone else played them years later. People like me would stay late and play Decent, Quake, Warcraft, etc (RCT was a trailing edge game) on our work computers, because we certainly didn't have those kinds of specs at home until much later.