I haven't thought too deep about my desire for the industry to push to indie, but this was an interesting read.
Another point that I've thought though, is that marketing budgets are insanely high in AAA in order to cut through the noise of the rest of social media.
I would imagine that if EA or whoever was pumping out 10 times as many games, they would need to share that marketing budget equally. The chance for cut-through for each game would be small and many of the projects wouldn't even make financial sense compared to putting bets on a smaller number of the bigger budget games. The game release cadence would be really confusing and noisy, with people not knowing what is worth playing.
Very much agree with the last point about games being profitable as fuck. It should be enough that the industry is making shed loads of money above cost without the need to increase shareholder value every quarter by cutting jobs.
I wonder how much of the ballooning cost of AAA budgets are due to losing technical expertise by staff turnover/churn? I can't imagine that creates an atmosphere of efficiency.