i_ni: Think big fishes do the same, not that uncommon to hire the services of smaller studios to do game assets outside the "inhouse" approach. Esp. when the schedule gets tight. I remember at least one case of an indie studio praising themselves for participating in an AAA project. Then they did an indie project(s?) of their own; can't recall names though.
Nowadays (AI assistants and such), the industry could be a bit different. It seems to me there are more supply(titles) then demand(returning paying customers, as far as I'm concerned), at least for PC titles. Could be completely wrong though.
Makes sense I guess. Still, takes the glory out of claiming to be a "one person project", but then if in the future you can use AI to perform 90% of the work when doing a new game alone, can it be called a one-person project, or is it at least meaningless to say so anymore?
One thing that I started wondering when reading that article of ever-increasing game development costs, what are the actual pain points where they increase the most? Is it e.g. because nowadays all character models must be first body scanned using real actors (like in Stellar Blade) etc., while decades ago it was enough to make a 3D character look like he was sorta walking or running etc. (reminds me of how stiff and unnatural the movement of Kain is in "Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen 2", but that doesn't really affect the actual gameplay, but maybe it would just be too laughable nowadays in an AAA game?).
If e.g. scanning real-live actors takes too much money in game development, do they really have to do that again and again for each and every game? Can't some body-scanning company offer premade animations "here is a voluptuous young woman running with jiggle physics, and here is an old man walking slowly"? Can't the same generic scanned animations be used in several games, just change some textures and dimensions (e.g. DDD cups instead of mere D) so that it looks a bit different, but still believable?
It would be interesting to see a breakdown of development costs for games that take hundreds of millions of dollars to make, where all the money sank? 50 million for creating all the textures for the game (or buying them from Textures'R'Us who makes them), 150 million for body scanning live actors for the game, 500 million for a big name voice actor (I hope cheap AI can replace most game voice actors in the future, at least for generic NPCs), 1 billion for using Unreal Engine 5, etc.?
