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A game that makes, years after development started, exactly its budget back is hardly breaking even (unless the development cycle is short inflation starts to count), but not being a first party you take away a cut from that... still this is a very poor investment opportunity cost wise as you have zero profit margins.
Some, many, of these businesses had to raise capital to start with, may need to make investments, etc... operating with 0% profit margins or very low ones is an extremely risky or impractical point of view.
Then again, you may have a much less capitalist friendly attitude than I do (and believe me I am no laissez-faire capitalist), so we may disagree on bigger investments (game development costs have risen) deserving higher Return on Investment/profit margins as you are locking for years a bigger portion of cash and thus increasing your risk. I do not think it is practical to see it otherwise.
Especially for series that are not amenable to or that we gamers would not want to see file with predatory micro transactions... we already had $60 games like COD, Battlefield, FIFA, NBA2K, etc... that are full price games with tons of micro transactions on top which bring their projected per user game value a lot higher than $60.
Small or medium sized studios with a new IP (we all want NEW IP’s, right?) take a far heavier risk compared to Sequel 6 of a major blockbuster IO that kind of market itself/gets lots of gaming bloggers/“press” coverage because of its lineage. They need full prices, some people scream “greedy, you should only price at $30-40 at most!!!!”. When people realise this I will have an easier time acccepting their Netflix style dreams without debating them.
Gamers have, IMHO, forced those developers that did not want to make their games live services / micro transaction filled experiences (which is what those same gamers wished not to happen and these developers complied with) compete with one or both arms tied behind their backs as they had their MSRP artificially limited.