I understand aspects of the budget bloat, but not others. Paycheques, marketing, licenses, sure.

The drive for extra content... I understand why players would want it. I want it, as a player. I don't understand it from the development angle as much. Making games heavy on custom content raises costs an order of magnitude, and therefore risk. It also potentially raises QA costs hugely, especially if bad content can break gameplay or rendering. I know that some places have great in-house tools for content creation and management. I'd love to see more freely available tools, models and other assets. Maybe not everybody, but certainly a lot of people are re-inventing the wheel again and again. Re-inventing the wheel takes a lot of manpower, and therefore a lot of money.

especially if bad content can break gameplay or rendering

Bad assets do not break gameplay. They just reduce the experience. And, leaves a promise of a higher AAA sequel to be made.

But gameplay, many times, cannot be separated from certain parts of asset presentation, at least- not of those interaction needed parts.

Like I mean, lets say I would make a game "Female Bodybuilder".

Girls would pick a thin girl with custom parameters of look. A lot of feeding deeding fun would come in, but if the avatar could flex muscle as a representative of USA - only upon VGA text comments of judges, it would suck. But if player could examine his avatar majestic muscle before competition in high realism, it would be breath taking, allowing to combine pleasure of play-result along with the chalenge.

But why? Becouse in this game the muscles would be actual chalenge deciding parameter. Maybe later, even routines and stuff would get implemented and so on and so on

When I'm talking about bad content breaking gameplay I don't mean simple art/sound assets, but more things from a level design angle. For example if a table is placed too close to a door and collision detection prevents you walking through it, or if the door is scaled too large and you can't reach the panel that opens the door, or if a scripted prefab relies upon something else existing in your level and crashes if it doesn't exist. There can of course be interactions with the assets, such as if your level design software allows automatic collision geometry creation and the polygons of the mesh have normals facing the wrong way. All hypothetical, but I'm sure there are many real-world scenarios similar to that.

. For example if a table is placed too close to a door and collision detection prevents you walking through it, or if the door is scaled too large and you can't reach the panel that opens the door, or if a scripted prefab relies upon something else existing in your level and crashes if it doesn't exis

wrong, if it will donate to gameplay conflict- all is good. Playable of course, then you hit the spot

For major AAA video games it costs $20-100 million. That's true, but some video games cost thousands or were made no cost using open source applications and software yet netted the game developer millions of dollars. There have also been popular video games, such as Minecraft (original) which had relatively short development times. Back to your comment directly, the cost of the most expensive games is generally rising slowly every year and someday in the next few years I expect to see a video game that truly rivals motion pictures in the 500 Million + range to develop, advertise, and distribute.

Holy cr@p! That is a fortune! It is a multi-billion dollar per year industry in gross sales, so the incentive is there. Where do companies get that kind of money? Sometimes many sources, but the AAA title companies have stock investors, commercial banks, private investors, and sometimes government loans (especially with new ventures) - added to the leverage on previous sales. Reputation does a lot to gain trust in risk assessment areas, so a company in good standing has a lot of attraction if they say that they believe a game concept will be profitable. Do they actually make profits? On average there is huge profit potential, but every year thousands of game development companies fail including a few big ones. Where does the money go to? The overhead expenses are many for AAA title games so the list is huge. The profit margin is usually in the single digit percentage of gross sales with 1-3 % being typical. That might seem to be not worth it but the company is paying off huge assets which increase the value of the company in the process. If a game grosses over 1 Billion in sales, then you see the leverage in that. By the time the owners sell the company, it might be worth many millions of dollars even if they barely broke even in profits, so the sale of the company is when they make the big money.