Those AAA studios sell many, many more copies of their games (like, orders of magnitude more). The demand/sales curves are totally different when you are sellin

Those AAA studios sell many, many more copies of their games (like, orders of magnitude more). The demand/sales curves are totally different when you are selling tens or hundreds of thousands of copies of a game. And yes, it does play into their budgeting/planning calculus as well. There's a reason there are so many franchise games these days...