[toadpipe]

If someone could come along and invest the millions of man hours required in making a performance-critical high-level language without the C-baggage

As long as it also had C syntax, and something close to the C memory model, and was recognizably object oriented and/or functional. And came with a lot of libraries. And 3D graphics engines. And physics engines.

Unless some independent game developer does something in a new language that other developers can't easily duplicate with their current ecosystem (not that it couldn't be done in C++), and it catches on, there's no incentive to do anything other than continue to evolve things in the most backwards compatible way. There are always more C++ programmers coming off the assembly lines who want nothing more than to work on games.