Not sure who you are arguing with.  I think everyone knows GTA is a unique franchise.  It will sell 30+ million at full price.  And will have plenty of DLC especially for the online portion.  And of course developers need to be strategic with indie, AA and AAA activities.  The movie industry has a wide variety of offerings just like gaming.  Avatar still exists as will big budget games. 

Of course not every game can be big budget, that is common sense everyone agrees with.  

Even $600 million is not feasible, there's only 2 whopping games on the PS4 that have sold over 20 million copies ... GTAV and Spider-Man, nothing else has sold more than that. 

If budgets continue to double from what they are becoming today because a small part of the audience demands bettererererrrererer graphics every 5-6 years, you're going to have a business where a lot of studios simply cannot even play in that sandbox at all. 

Cyberpunk 2077 is already north of $400 million and really that budget is probably more like $600 million anywhere else, they get away with paying people less in Poland. 

Hollywood is also in big trouble, the problem there was all big movies now have a standard budget of $200 million+ ... it's not just "well only Avatar does it", it's every big blockbuster movie basically has to have that as a minimum to even compete. So Aquaman has that budget, The Flash has a $220+ million budget, The Little Mermaid has a $250 million budget, this freaking movie has a $200+ million budget:

That's the problem, it's not just one game going up in budget, the budgets for all types of games are being pushed upwards every 5-6 years, and the price of the games should really be $90-$100 to account for that. 

In gaming $300-$400 million looks like the new standard cost for a lot of big games already, Spider-Man 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Starfield are all over $300 million. GTA will obviously blow that away. 

AI tools are coming and will reduce development costs.  RT has massive benefits to developers.  More than the benefit to consumers.  More will be coming.  The market will adjust, it always does.  Big games aren't going away.

The number of studios willing to make "big games" will decline and the number of studios will to take a risk and make a new IP with a top budget will decline. The only Japanese studio for example that could compete in the space of making games for $400+ million a pop would be like Nintendo and they're too smart to get caught up in spending that kind of money. Capcom, Square-Enix, all these other companies will get priced out even Sony won't give their Japanese teams that kind of money to spend. 

And the truth is these games are not even close to photorealism either. If 1 billion still gets you a game that looks fairly cartoony, what is the cost to go well beyond that? $4 billion dollars? Who is financing that exactly? And that of course I assume is still only going to cost $70? lol. 

Thirdly, any kind of setup where these companies are going to fire actual humans in favor of AI is something I will never support. They want to do that, I will not buy those games, simple as that. Ray tracing already exists if a developer doesn't want to do baked lighting that hasn't brought budgets down at all. If we're talking the automation of the actual development process, I'm not going to support the wholesale destruction of thousands of peoples' livelihoods for something stupid like having better lighting in a game. Anyone naive enough to think that will only be limited to industries like film/TV/games is kidding themselves. 

AI is coming and yes it will reduce need for a number of workers.  Part of life.  You don't think computers and automation hasn't already put a lot of people out of work?

This is not remotely the same thing and it's not just going to be a "few workers". An AI that can reason and create can replace almost all jobs eventually. 

Thinking that is a great solution is like thinking "my house is a bit cold, guess I'll light my curtains on fire". Yes, you will get warmth ... temporarily. You're not going to like what happens next though. 

We will have to agree to disagree.  You, and many others, support a wide variety products that cost jobs.  TurboTax reduced the need for a great many CPAs.  Technology rolls forward and yes it comes at a cost.  More and more of my job is predictive modeling.  Adjust or fall behind.  

This is not the same thing as Turbo Tax. Not even close. 

An AI could destroy the need for accountants period, Turbo Tax did not do that. 

People who think this will just be contained in a few industries and obviously won't affect their line of work are lying to themselves. 

I won't be supporting it and once people actually realize their own jobs will eventually be at risk, there will be mass protests in the streets to stop it and if governments won't listen to that, then eventually violence will follow. It's inevitable. 

I won't be supporting game developers that destroy the lives of thousands of people just "for graphics". Sorry. 

Lol, if you say so.  TurboTax absolutely reduced the need for accountants.  Same with excel.  Same is true for many other technologies.

Big games aren't going anywhere.  We will see a raise in developers tools and AI modeling to keep costs down.  

I don't think that's going to actually work out in any kind of way you think it is. Turbo Tax again reduced the need for accountants. Did it replace all of them? AI might. 

Do you think any AI company is going to spend billions/trillions of dollars to develop some incredible AI tool that can make games easily and then just limit that to a very small pool of customers like game companies? 

No. They will release that to a market of millions and millions of "regular people" because that's a market of hundreds of millions. Like OpenAI and MidJourney isn't worth shit if they just restricted their AI services to industrial clients. The whole point is "anyone" can just put in some prompts and come out with a AI created image or term paper or whatever. 

Then you're going to have a flood of games all over the place, much like Tiktok and Instagram are the new media platforms for video content, not Hollywood. Now you can argue that's a great thing, I don't think it's going to be as great as you think it is. 

The whole model of the industry in that case I don't even think will "exist" in the way people think. You'll have people just making and probably ripping off game assets to make their own Smash Bros. or GTA whatever and likely there is going to be all sorts of copyright issues too. The "modding" industry will completely take over the business as you'll have like probably dozens (hundreds?) of variants of popular games with all kinds of content changes.

You're going to end up with a setup where millions of people have no jobs but are sitting at home thinking they're going to be the next big "content creator". When everyone can make anything easily, then the value of that becomes nothing. The industry as you know it now won't exist likely in that scenario, it'll be a bunch of people making "homebrew" games all over the place and flooding whatever market is even left who will pay for anything.