Quote - The whole point of games engines is make an image that will fool people into accepting it as good enough to make it believable.  So even though the images look nice they are not the same same thing as a rendered image that trys to portray how the scene would look like using real world type of lights and reflections and all the other pieces that a game engine will fake and gloss over. 

That's a point that people still have a hard time getting. Animation allows you a set of cheats that realistic still rendering does not, and vice versa.

Let's say you rendered a scene where a character is looking across a busy freeway, and you want it to be realistic. One is animated, one is a still (with a high simulated shutter speed, so minimal to no motion blur in the still). Or a shot where a superhero is swooping over a parking lot, same deal.

With the animated one, realistically simulating glass and reflection in the vehicles would be a complete and utter waste of time because that level of detail simply wouldn't be detected anyway by the viewer, so rendering it would be a waste of time. Use fake reflections, and certainly not real glass.

For a realistic still, you can't do that.

That's one of the secrets of game engines: they are primarily designed to make scenes with motion and moving objects look good. But in those games, no matter how realistic, if you stop moving and simply look around in a still scene, the fakeness is immediately apparent. Flat billboards instead of 3D objects. Fake reflections and shadows. Identical instances. Obviously fake matte backgrounds. To paraphrase Monty Oum, they cheat like motherf*ckers when they can, and that's perfectly okay. When the game engine is in motion, great. When it isn't, enh, not so much.