Budgets this size are common now for AAA games. Not surprising at all.

Not really. It does happen but it's not common. Especially not for linear titles.

Don't look at me: I was astonished that PS2 games could be developed for a profit...

Game budgets are like Moore's law. Doubling every 18 months.

It's not uncommon for AAA games to range in the 100-500M+ range. What budget defines a AAA game? 50M+? Can't really say, but all the big ones seem to cross over 100M easy these days. 

Gears E-Day is not strictly  linear. It has side objectives like rescuing people in buildings as they demonstrated in the direct. It's the longest Gears game according to the devs. Not to mention 4v4 pvp and 12 person horde mode. 

They don't have to be though..... there are mega hit's, that sell well, without costing that much.

Nintendo's formula seems to be great (alot of their games are very cheaply made, compared to sony/xbox ones).
Clair Obscur Expedition 33, made by like 30ppl cost less than $10m in total.

What Sony and Xbox are doing is not sustainable.... You cannot keep using more and more time, and resources on games.
Development time needs to come down, and you need to rain in scope of games. Basically you need to trim all the fat, studios are carrying,
get them lean & slim and focused on working with higher direction/scope of things.
I.e  You need to fire alot of people, tell studios to change how they do things. 

There are going to be alot of unhappy people soon from a video game crash..... because AAA games are not sustainable at ever increasing prices of development.

And the solution isn't that everyone in the industry tries to hop on a trend like GaaS shooters.
"Variety is the spice of life" is esp. true in the gaming market imo. Too many all doing the same thing = alot of people will fail.

$100 million and $500 million aren't in the same category. Gears's budget is too high for what it is, why is this even debatable? I don't recall anyone arguing that Spider-Man 2 wasn't too expensive even though it may end up selling over 3 times more on PS5 than Gears on all platforms.

Call a spade a spade.

While $100m is quite common and $200m might be somewhat common, although probably only for studios who have experienced massive success with their previous games, I very much doubt there are many $400m games in existence. CoD games, Rockstar Games, Battlefield 6, maybe something like Halo: Infinite strayed into that territory. Oh, and Star Citizen…

33 was made by far more than 30 people. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/no-clair-obscur-expedition-33-wasnt-made-by-30-people

So they had like 8 animators hired to help, with animation of characters, and some musicians (for music) and translators for localisation ect. ect.

Yeah its more than 30 people,... but like it's not 200-500 people working on it like with AAA games.

And honestly, I don't blame them for getting some extra help....
they are a tiny studio, that made a wonderful game, pretty cheaply, while teaching themselves how to do certain tasks (learning on the go), and doing multiple roles of things themselves.

There are certainly some areas of modern game development that don’t seem to make sense to me. For example, Avowed(which is a relatively small production) had 2 narrative leads, 12 people credited for Narrative and 6 additional narrative. One person can write War & Peace but it takes 20 people over 5-6 years to write Avowed? Surely a lot of these people were just getting in each others way, and having conflicting ideas.