It's easy to be profitable when you're just making a sandbox and your players make the games, but at that point are you a game developer? (Roblox)
High end graphics cards have become so expensive that people can't afford gaming with good graphics
AAA developers aren't optimizing games as well as they used to, so only high end hardware would even run them
AAA is more focused on loot boxes, microtransactions, season passes, and cinematics all wrapped up in great visuals. That's at the expense of innovative gameplay and interesting stories. Making the graphics worse won't get execs to greenlight better games, just uglier ones. And they'll still be $70.
Even when games are huge successes and profitable, studios are getting bought and shut down (EA, Microsoft, Sony?), so it's hard to say the corps are hurting.

[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 2 days ago

High end graphics cards have become so expensive that people can’t afford gaming with good graphics

Not only that, but mid range cards just haven't really moved that much in terms of performance. The ultra high end used to be a terrible value only for people who want the best and didn't care about money. Now it almost makes sense from a performance per dollar standpoint to go ultra high end. At launch the 4090 was almost twice the performance of the 4080, but only cost about 1.5x. And somehow the value gets worse the lower end you go.

Meanwhile mid-high end cards like the 4060 and 7600 (which used to be some of the best values) are barely outperforming their predecessors.