The difficulty is, indie gaming killed the AA game segment. They disappeared during the rise of digital game distribution. Nobody wanted to pay $40 for those $10 million budget games anymore. And most gamers only play a few games a year, easier to lure those with high budget games for everyone. 

We went from every game being $60 making it possible for smaller numbers of games like Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom to make a profit, to people feeling anything that's not AAA budget can't cost more than $20-$30, wait for sale, while they still sell in lower numbers. 

The average price for an indie game on Steam is approximately $3.99 to $10...

If it was easier to recover costs, AA games would still exist.

Or 1000 games for 100.000 each!

Hmmmm. No wonder those rumours of gta6 being tested on switch 2 are leaking. That games budget must be tremendous.

Wonder if they are shooting for a release on all platforms day one to maximize sales.

Game budgets have truly got out of hand, and the returns are diminishing. I personally don’t need a room reflecting in a characters eyes etc. bit to each their own.

Not enough people to play them. Think of blockbuster movies, there is a limited amount of them being released every year, because there is so much money and time people can spend going to the cinema

It's also the human resource factor here. How many competent developers are available to create so many games? The market would be flooded with low quality crap

It's not that different actually. The number of moviegoers who pay for indie movies is rather small

The only successful indie movies are the ones that got huge distribution deals. Marketing costs for supposedly indie movies can cost over 100 million USD to make them competitive in awards season. In this case people are buying tickets not because of the budget production value, but because of the marketing value. Different things, yet the same thing 

I don't remember many kids back in 1990 playing SMB 3 for the first time and complaining that it wasn't AAA. And you can say the same about all games up to a point. A great game is a great game, and people will buy them regardless. The industry would be fine if they scaled back. After all, look at Fortnite. Not that I'd advocate for crap like that, but it's not really pushing the hardware, you know? So if the industry collectively decided to go in another direction, people would follow.

True. However I've never heard people say a 90 minute movie should be half price compared to a 3 hour movie. Or an indie production should cost $5 in the cinema or DVD. It's usually the blockbusters that are cheaper on DVD/Blu-ray.

Most indie movies never get distributed with 10,000 movies made yearly. 

Yeah different but same-ish. People don't gather huge backlogs of cheap movies after all. That's all on streaming services now. It's hard and expensive to get attention to your project. With games as well, and if you need to spend $50 million to market a game well, you wouldn't do that with a low budget game.

Figures are all over the place 

The marketing budget for God of War Ragnarök is estimated to be between $8 million and $100 million, though Sony does not release official figures. When combined with an estimated development cost of up to $90 million, the total project cost may have exceeded $180 million.

The specific marketing budget for Spider-Man 2 is not publicly disclosed, but sources suggest the total budget (including production and marketing) was around $300 million to $315 million. Some leaks indicate the marketing budget might be in the range of $30 million separate from the production costs.

I wonder if 11 million Spiderman 2 sales is enough? (first 6 months sales) Needed avg $29 return per copy sold, works for first party.

Ragnarok must have made a nice profit in comparison with 15 million sales at 'lower' budget.

I see an additional behavioral layer that helps explain why people think about movie prices differently compared to games

The first point is that although movies have different budgets, the movie theater itself is a service. When you buy a ticket, you're not only paying for the movie but paying for the theater experience. It's more like an entry fee to use the space rather than a price for the product alone

And even then, Hollywood has already found ways to increase prices through 3D screenings, VIP rooms, and IMAX. In Brazil, it's not uncommon for movies to have vastly different average ticket prices depending on the type of theater they are released. Blockbusters are released in shopping-mall cinemas, while more indie or alternative productions appear in street theaters or lower-budget theaters. These indie movies usually only screen in big cities because they don't get massive distribution deals

The second point is that indie games have always needed to be much cheaper to overcome their already insurmountably high visibility barrier. Unlike movies, which provide maybe 2 to 3 hours of entertainment games can last up to 100 hours. I can easily watch over 100 movies in a year, but I struggle to play more than 10 to 15 games. Two indie movies are not directly competing for my limited attention spam and I can watch a mediocre movie out of simply boredom without no major commitment, but games require multiple extra layers of engagement

This creates an environment where people expect indie games to be cheap simply because they have always been cheap and if they're not cheap, there will always be someone else who is cheaper, supply and demand really

Not all copies are sold at full price, and the sale price also includes taxes in a lot of countries. If taxes are 20% (and don't forget the platform cut) and the average price per copy is $40 instead of $70, suddenly the publisher is already 'only' at $120 million of revenue, and that's without marketing. Of course even this might not be realistic, but I think it's easy to see how easily you end up with much less revenue if you tweak the initial assumptions.

AA's not quite dead; it's definitely declined hugely since the 6th gen where it flourished, but stuff like say Sniper Elite or Plague Tale still manage to hold on.