Why didn’t the bit war continue into the seventh generation? Why didn’t the amount of bits double to 256 bits like they did in past generations? Any insight into this would be appreciated.
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There’s a lot of answers addressing the technical side of it, but I want to add something else since I lived through the whole console war and saw all the ads and hype.
After the SNES and Genesis, they started with the whole 32/64 bit marketing, with the Nintendo 64 being the most vocal about it in its name. But beyond the technical limitations of not needing to go beyond 64 bit processing, there’s another major reason why the marketing of it was dropped.
In 1994, the Atari released the Jaguar, a “64 bit” processor gaming console. You can look up the history of it for more detail, but to put it simply, it was a massive pile of crap. It also had some false advertising for a 64 bit console, since it only had a 32 bit CPU and used different components and technical tricks to kinda process up to 64 bits.
Anyway, it left a sour taste in gamers’ mouths and when you have a handful of companies wanting a piece of the next gen pie and a rapid community to feed it to, you steer away from any bad publicity.
When the Nintendo 64 was first being advertised, it was the Nintendo Ultra 64. They played up the 64 bit in a major way, but after the things like the Jaguar and other companies focusing so much on the bit, they shyed away from it. Other companies followed suit cause they either wanted to avoid similar negative marketing or they didn’t want to admit their competitors (namely Nintendo at the time) had a stronger system.
Of course, the focus on 3d graphics changed what people viewed was important or exciting in games by that gen too.
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