Do they? Do they refuse to buy games that don't meet some arbitrary AAA standards?

Do they? Do they refuse to buy games that don't meet some arbitrary AAA standards? Or can those games still be hugely successful?

You don't need to lower wages to makes games profitable if you don't employ 600 people for one game in the first place. It's not all that hard to make a good game with a much smaller team and budget. Plenty of devs do it on a regular basis even.

It's also kind of funny that you're defending stuff like loot boxes claiming "devs need it to make money" yet some of the main offenders for that kind of stuff are the biggest and most popular games in the industry, ya know... the ones that will easily make a profit without them...

In a word: No.

Here's a publisher telling it's shareholders - the only people they feel any desire to be truthful to - that a profit turning business model has been axed but bears no detriment to their bottom line.  What this means is that $60 + DLC + Season Pass + multi tiered deluxe editions are making them the intended profit.  At $60, they're still making more money than you or I will ever see in our lives.  

As others have pointed out to you, publishers make their own beds.  That $60 goes farther than it ever has, with costs of physical production at an all time low and the rapidly rising sales of digital copies.  Yet they continue to perpetuate the lie that games are so expensive - they aren't.  In fact, it's more affordable than ever.  It's when you kick your budget management out the door and add unnecessary "features" and prolong development that they get expensive.

If you're feeling sorry for developers and their hungry families, point them to Ninja Theory, who just struck gold with Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice.  Or the thousands of independent developers who are raking it in on the Nintendo Switch alone.  Developers like Respawn that deal with the devil get no sympathy from me; in today's market, publishers are not a necessary evil like they once were.  

There's no excuse in a digital era for "starving artists" nor the greed fueled corporations trying to coax them into signing the dotted line.

The talk was about AAA games. None of those you posted is one. Why do people keep taking things out of context?!

So what you are basically saying is just because people buy indie games there shouldn’t be any high budget AAA games anymore?! Especially since those game weren’t sold at full price...

Naa, you're thinking about your own motives for disliking it. I'm talking about their motives for disliking it because they apply to phone games too:

 "The mixing of money and addiction is gambling," the Gaming Commission declared. Belgium's Minister of Justice Koen Geens also weighed in, saying, "Mixing gambling and gaming, especially at a young age, is dangerous for the mental health of the child." 

And there have been numerous stories over the years of children costing parents hundreds of dollars/pounds because of mobile game transactions. So why now? 

Naa, you're thinking about your own motives for disliking it. I'm talking about their motives for disliking it because they apply to phone games too:

 "The mixing of money and addiction is gambling," the Gaming Commission declared. Belgium's Minister of Justice Koen Geens also weighed in, saying, "Mixing gambling and gaming, especially at a young age, is dangerous for the mental health of the child." 

And there have been numerous stories over the years of children costing parents hundreds of dollars/pounds because of mobile game transactions. So why now?