There have been a shit tonne of indie and independently developed games that now print billions in revenue per year and were made by studios whose stock isn't listed on any exchange, e.g. Epic Games, the devs of Roblox, Hoyoverse, the Minecraft dev prior to their acquisition, etc etc.
It's easy to look at the successes and not at the swath of middle of the road cases or outright failures. The latter 2 outnumber the former by a ton.
It's not like the game market's growth to this point of scale, wasn't majorly/entirely facilitated by the AAA-output of publicly traded publishers from between the 90s up until now.
It's frankly a myth (perpetuated by the giant publishers themselves---likely to continue to justify their own existence) that what the gaming market wants is larger and larger AAAA+ massively multiplayer, open world, bleeding edge, grind-a-thon, live service monoliths of a game. The pubs keep pushing this narrative and then every now and again a game like Palworld or Genshin Impact or Helldivers 2 comes along and utterly dismantles that narrative.
It's just weird that you say all of the bolded in a negative light and then use Palworld and Genshin Impact as examples. In fact, your previous examples of Roblox, and your insinuations towards Fortnite and the Hoyverse products share at least 1-2 aspects of what you're criticizing, and it tends to be the worst of those. Like, the whole reason why a lot of the established publishers are going after the bolded is
because of stuff like Fortnite, Genshin, Minecraft, etc.
Helldivers 2 kinda debunks your own point about people not wanting greater production values. The first game was smaller in budget and scope, but similar in its design. They go AAA - with the financial backing of a publicly traded 1st party publisher, I'll add - and the game is a success that blows the first out of the water. Palworld is open world MMO Pokémon with better graphics and greater gameplay scope. It owes its success to the gap Nintendo has left in the market by not using the resources to elevate their IP on a technical level, as opposed to coasting on an asset base barely distinguishable to what they were using since the 3DS installments.
Game budgets ballooning continue to do so because pubs are intentionally driving up dev costs in order to weed out their competition and justify higher upfront pricing with deeper, ever more scummy MTX models.
I think this is just a naive understanding of the "why" for game dev cost ballooning.
Publishers did not mean institute a generational shift in attitudes towards work in the game industry (anti-crunch and the like); or even
intentionally create organizational bloat and bureaucracy for themselves; or have their entire workforce hook themselves on the idea of remote work as a result of governmental overreach; or pump the entire western economy with inflationary money not backed up by real-value. These are the main things that have increased costs for tech as a whole, not just gaming.
By the way, there's nothing underhanded or immoral about using your fairly earned cale and size to add high production values to your product's list of selling points. Lol
Related to the previous quote, you should also understand that Epic, Hoyverse and every other private, indie or publicly traded success does exactly that. Fortnite might not look the most cutting edge on a technical level, but it's production values show in the amount of content Epic makes for it at the speed they work at. It's very expensive and difficult to make a multiplayer game that's good enough to gain a significant player base and to keep and monetize that player base therein with sufficiently regular and large updates. With all of their money, resources and IP, Sony concluded that their marquee studio could not keep up with that.
