I'm surprised that there isn't a big company that specializes in producing huge amounts of low budget games.
Hollywood has Blumhouse Productions, the company that made Paranormal Activity, The Purge, Get Out, the new Halloween movies and many many more.
Their average budgets are <$10 million so a movie is profitable when it makes $25 million, something that would be really bad for a bigger movie.
Once you have a hit like Get Out, $4.5 million budget and $255 million gross, that pays for 30 other movies.
Once you get a franchise going like Paranormal Activity, $28 million combined budget of all 6 movies and a $889 million combined gross, you become one of the richest people in Hollywood, like Jason Blum, the owner of the company, has.
Sooner or later, someone like Jason Blum will show up in gaming and that dude (and it will be a dude, sorry ladies) will be swimming in money like Scrooge McDuck.
One of the problems with this is the Console Gap.
A smaller indie project can plop itself on Steam and do fine enough, but it can't quite fill that 'AA' niche of the market without also reaching out to the console market. But getting on consoles, particularly as a physical disk, is an expensive process, and can be quite involved atop of the licensing costs. To make that financially sensible, you need to be very successful on the console market, requiring you to push towards the AAA space and the downsides that it entails.
Instead, a lot of people shifted towards mobile, which has all the advantages of being widely distributed as consoles, while being incredibly lax to get onto via app stores, and went to work. Unfortunately, its actually counterproductive on Mobile to produce a gameplay loop thats long and involved, as they're very much 'pocket games'. At the absolute most, your play window is 30 minutes for a lunch break, but anything past 5 minutes or so is diminishing returns, where you might be actively hurting the experience.
Its similar to the problem faced by content creators between youtube and twitch - Youtube financially incentivizes smaller content, thats easily marketed and consumed, making it a financially poor choice to create edited, long form content. Twitch is much better for long form video content, but fundamentally changes the audience and community, and is not suitable to analysis style content. There's a gap in the middle thats difficult to exploit, none of the existing tools quite cover it well, and nobody in the market really knows how to, in a centralized fashion. It only works for a handful of people with unusual funding styles - Patreon for video creators, and kickstarter for game creators.
Things are slowly shifting towards it becoming more viable, as the line between console and PC narrows, making development of cross platform far less arduous, and a potential hole in the market is opening as AAA franchise fatigue seems to intensify in the average player. But I don't think AA development from smaller houses is going to be the revolution.
I think the cost of developing AAA games, whatever that even means, will go down. Lots of assets are available to drop in because of things like Quixel Megascans. AI and procedural generation can take care of routine world-building tasks and reduce the necessary staff, collision sounds can be created by an engine in real time, etc. Once almost everyone has powerful ray-tracing capable hardware, like in 5 years with another update to the consoles and a few GPU generations, they can drop support for older hardware and all lighting will be easier.
This is the likely developmental path. The accessibility gap of AAA quality will shrink, around the same time as the next generation of blooded names get their first passion projects. By that, I mean the leads who happen to make really successful changes to franchises, and build a reputation in their organization, leveraging it to get some resources for that one game they've always really wanted to make - they'll be able to stretch and pitch that idea much farther with cheaper, better development options.
