>>15728393
Your theory assumes some correlation between an increase in project budget and a positive effect on any measure of quality whatsoever, which is bullshit.
Given the following
>A. Game quality doesn't correlate to sales
>B. Maketing does
>C. The overwhelming majority of your demographic only plays games for the social aspect
Then it follows that this checklist becomes the guiding principles for your project:
>A1. Minimize number of games, this is wasted money. If you have to put a down payment of $1M for every game you make, before you can start marketing it, then you want as few games as physically possible to minimize development budget cutting into your marketing budget.
>A2. Minimize cost of games, similar to A1, but as the budget goes up, so does the risk of deadlines being missed, and the risk of complexity causing bugs and other things that make it seem "unpolished" go up
>B. Avoid a game with a striking style, or theme
>B1. this damages your marketing population breadth, you sacrifice parts of your target demographic which find it offputting
>B2. The effect of B1 increases exponentially as you start to cut into the social effect (assumption C) your game can create.
>B3. you run the risk of braindead "reviewers" being confused by it in the 5 minutes they spend playing it
>C. Avoid making a good game, in general
>C1. you raise the standard and that increases your minimum buy in for future releases (in the form of development costs) before you can start marketing them
>C2. you risk players becoming attached to it, which will take market share from future releases.
>C3. similar to A2, you increase risk in general the higher you aim.
To address some of your points,
>Increase in development costs
A result of developers for a long time failing to recognize C1
>price of video games has failed to rise with inflation for over twenty years now
Its hard to observe that in australia- but I have heard its the case in the US and europe, this would be a result of taking an approach where market penetration is the most important factor (which the above theory is built around), lower cost maximizes rate of adoption, and when your unit production price is 0, you're going to go as low as you can.
>These publishers are the ones who can afford the nicest looking games
This is deceitful if not straight up false, the "nicest looking games" which are successful, look awful, they're hammered with post processing effects like chromatic aberration, depth of field, bloom, these aren't expensive effects. Conversely their art and design departments are mostly staffed by interns. The effort is only to give the appearance of "progress towards fidelity" for the sake of marketing.
Your last paragraph comes to the conclusion that game quality falls as a necessity, but instead, it's at the opposite, and quality is purposefully kept down to minimize risk and costs.