They all seem to want to release these Hogwarts Legacy or Elden Ring style AAA megahits, but the simple fact of the matter is that only a handful of games are capable of sales on that tier. These publishers simply can't afford to keep pushing AAA games only at the expense of AA and A. AAA budgets have ballooned enormously, a decade or so ago the average AAA development + marketing budget was around $100m, these days the average has pushed closer to $200m and some AAA games are at $300m or above. Chasing AAA only while AAA budgets remain this high just isn't sustainable, these publishers are going to have to wake up and start cutting AAA costs as much as possible, moving studios out of these high cost of living cities, reducing graphics and animation quality, smaller dev team sizes, shorter development cycles, some combination of those are going to be needed to get AAA budgets back down to a sustainable level, and they also need to allow AA and A to continue to flourish, instead of killing them to chase AAA only. 

What's even more hilarious is that a Hogwarts Legacy AAA megahit STILL isn't even enough since WB Games is now doubling down on live service games. 

That's another side of the current market, if you want to make big investment you have 2 option:

Blockbuster or GAAS

Blockbuster lead to big but short lived payout, GAAS lead to consistent revenue, both are high risk high rewards even more so for GAAS but a win there mean you are not going to roll the dice on another project for sometime.

Of course you can make the choice of going with smaller investment but this market is also just has much cannibalised by other blockbuster/GAAS, is limiting your ability to market product and lead you to roll the dice more often.

Overall big publisher have decided to limit their smaller investment, after all the indie market is full of smaller teams that constantly roll the dice, so the lower risk option for bigger player is just to try to buy player who had a successful throw. 

Just PC (emulate switch hehe)

It feels like an issue where a lot of these companies are following trends, even though a lot of them would be better off if they didn't. 

WB is probably looking at a lot of analytics that shows live service is very successful. But there are tons of problems with chasing that. The live service space is very competitive. A lot of people have no interest in live service games. So in a lot of cases you're swapping a dedicated fanbase for a competitive one and losing out. 

The analytics are still going to show how GTA Online, Fortnite, CoD, etc are all huge, so we should try making something like that.

A big issue is even if 10 AAA games fail, the 11th one being a huge success is frequently considered better than 11 AA games that just do okay.  

Hi-Fi was also the most critically acclaimed 1st party Xbox game since what, Halo 3?

Actually Forza Horizon 5 in 2021. Averaged a 92 MC and OC score.

You're right, I forgot about Forza. Forza (horizon anyway) is pretty much always critically acclaimed.

y’all should take a break, I’m playing Metroid Prime Remastered, it has pew pew gameplay and it looks good too. Never played a Metroid, I like it, this is good.