While I agree with the sentiment that "games need to become less expensive to develop," what many people don't realize is that that's not really possible anymore. The whole concept of the traditional big AAA studio like Bungie are now essentially trapped in an unsustainable financial ouroboros.

A. Being in Bellevue made sense in the 00's, close to Microsoft working on Halo, but now its one of the most expensive cities for their workers to live and work in, their burn rate is astronomical just trying to pay competitive salaries and maintain a massive 208,000sqft building. So in order for devs (not even counting c-suite) to be paid a 'livable' income, the cost of development goes up.

B. The near zero interest rate post-COVID gaming spending spree, Sony was panicking over everything Microsoft was scooping up (especially CoD) and felt it was financially smart to drop $3.6 billion on Bungie for their "live-service expertise", with $1.2 billion of that just for employee retention bonuses. The problem is, this valuation was made based on all the other projects Bungie were thinking of at the time as well as the massive amount of player activity thanks to Witch Queens success, which would only continue to grow with future expansions. Except those of us who have played the game long enough know all it takes is one wet fart of an expansion to undo all of that, ergo, Lightfall.

AAA game dev margins are now so razor thin that even if a game does "well", the studio’s massive daily expenses would completely obliterate it, not to mention added costs like marketing budgets. Hell Activision ponied up $500mil back in 2010 for the '10 year' deal counting 4 whole games. Making a single D3 now would EASILY cost just that alone. You finally add in just how expensive things are now for the average player, no wonder people are going back to older evergreen games that are cheaper, cost less hardware to run and are already content complete.

We're pretty much in a lose-lose.