That being said, I fail to see how they relate or disprove the point
I was making - that perhaps we're currently paying too little for our games, which might cause some of the financial problems some studios are currently facing. High marketing costs or not, I'll still argue that it's not feasible to develop a AAA game with a targeted price point of $20. Even $50 is not that easy to make a healthy business case from. That's all I'm saying
Has it ever occurred to you that the number of people the AAA games appeal to isn't actually "all the people who own computers and play games on them"?
The crux of everything the AAA market stands for is perpetually increased system requirements year-on-year. Better graphics mean more system requirements, it's that simple. When a new game comes out from the AAA orifice, the first thing a lot of dedictaed gamers will think is not "is this an ok game?", but "is this game worth spending $1000 on a new system?"
So when you say $50 is already quite cheap for a new AAA game, you might be technically correct, however... it wouldn't cost someone like me $50 to play said game, it would cost me $1050 at the very least, as I would have to upgrade my entire hardware to play it.
Games like Skyrim, Witcher 3, Bloodborne etc are the kind of games where people think "OMG, I so want to play that" and this feeling will be numerous enough to provide enough sales. However, just because something is AAA doesn't mean it will have that kind of appeal. People may have paid $1050 to play Witcher 3, but that doesn't mean they'll then be hoovering up AAA games just because they can.
AAA, for all its mass appeal philosophy, is already selling to a niche whatever its content, the niche of people who upgrade every year. It's not a mass audience in the first place. And then, from that position, it has to actually appeal to a large proportion of that niche to even break even. I'm personally amazed any of them sell enough to make a profit, the entire structure of the process screams of impossibility.
If you actually wanted to appeal to the real mass market then you'd make games that could be played on as many systems as possible... you know, like Stardew Valley, Undertale, Minecraft.
The whole idea that AAA is scared of innovation because it spends so much money on producing a product and therefore has to dumb down games in order to appeal o as many people as possible is all so much of an ironic joke when you consider the AAA market isn't even a mass market in the first place, it's a very specific niche, and niches have very specific requirements, requirements that usually have very little to do with mass tastes.