Riiiigggghhhhht, AAA games are floundering, and the problem is because they're not charging enough for them. It has nothing to do with all the bloat that's been added to AAA games that's caused their budgets to balloon like...

• Making every game a massive open world with sprawling landscapes and/or city skylines.
• Pushing graphics to look more and more realistic by cramming as many ugly details into things that nobody wants to see and likely won't notice anyway, from eyebag wrinkles to hairs on a woman's face.
• Throwing in half-hearted RPG mechanics into games that have no business being RPGs, all for the sake of adding more "builds" and "playstyles" to now design and balance the game around.
• Voice-acting everything, even in-game encyclopedias and narration, with overpaid voice actors and sometimes even more overpaid celebrities (who always just phone it in).
• Turning every game into a cinematic story by painstakingly animating or motion-capturing dozens of cutscenes that will more often than not interrupt the flow of the game.
• Adding half-assed multiplayer or "games as service" features that exist purely to sell microtransactions to suckers, only to have to shut the servers down a year after release because not enough consumers bite (and because there are multiplayer games everywhere and they're all competing against one another).
• Advertising them in the most ridiculous ways, like buying ads on billboards, busses, and skyscrapers, or creating 5+ minute long "cinematic" trailers that use more high-resolution visuals and which in absolutely no way reflect how the games actually look or play at all.
• Making games with all the above and releasing them on a yearly basis, forcing companies to have to hire hundreds of people to crap out a single title just to keep up (and often abusing them).