You have to understand, triple A games have become increasingly expensive to make because people demand better and better graphics. As a result, game developers have been trying to make their games appeal to as many people as possible in order for it to sell well, which is why Dead Space 3 was an action/adventure game and had virtually no horror. Indie developers are able to create games with unqiue and interesting game mechanics that are cost effective because they sacrifice graphics.
That's really a misleading concept perpetuated by publishers. Games aren't cheap, no, but the amount of money being poured into marketing, outsourcing firms (which actually cost more per employee), extraneous development staff, excessively tight deadlines, and overblown expectations is a huge part of the issue. Resident Evil 6 had over 600 developers involved, including those working under contract from Korea, China, and elsewhere. Series like Assassin's Creed and Call of Duty are pumping out new games with barely a year between them.
The problem is that everybody wants every game to be Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto and sell 30 million copies, and so what's being spent per game isn't always appropriate for the game being made, and in an effort to appeal to everyone and hit those numbers, publishers are continually trying to retool every series they have, only to find that nobody was asking for every single game on the planet to be a multiplayer DLC fest with explosions and drab, grey dudes running around. Constantly trying to correct mistakes by making more mistakes is causing a lot of companies (Square Enix and Capcom being two of the worst culprits) to bleed money. Outsourcing everything with no focus on employee retention or investment in a lasting creative pool is causing companies to bleed money. Games like Tomb Raider, Hitman, and Resident Evil 6 have all sold millions of copies and were considered failures, despite more than quadrupling what sales expectations would've been several years ago. The same is true of dozens upon dozens of others.
Factor in DLC, which often costs virtually nothing to create (costumes and skins being particularly cheap), and publishers are sweeping up cash from it... but still posting losses because what they're promising to stockholders is completely out of touch with reality.
Then there's the human factor, wherein people can only work 50-80 hour work weeks for so long before they reach physical, emotional, and creative burnout, and probably spend most of their time on autopilot. They're working more hours, but less productive, particularly in the US. Statistically speaking, the US workforce puts in more hours per week than most industrialized countries, but has considerably less to show for it. The reason? Less vacation time, longer hours, lower quality of life than counterparts in countries like Germany and France. This ultimately costs companies money.
Games should have actually become more affordable to create. CPU and GPU power are massively beyond what they were during the PS2 days, to the point where they've levelled out somewhat for the first time ever - the emphasis now is more on power efficiency rather than sheer processing power. Computers and servers are cheaper to build than ever, making it possible to build large rendering farms running Linux for next to nothing. Since they're drastically more power efficient, even the electric bill should be going down.
A good case in point: Some years back, it cost me $325 for 1GB of low latency DDR SDRAM. It now costs me around $70-100 for 8-16GB of DDR3 SDRAM.
