I get a lot of Zenless Zone Zero stuff in my twitter feed (wonder why?).
There is a kind of
corporate element to this, how it's just set in an idealised
nice city, but making something this nice and frictionless at scale really is an open niche. Japanese stuff is nice but tends to divide its attention across loads of smaller projects (excellent for market health and culture). If you're going to have a 'AAA' industry it should either be undertaking Heaven's Gate style suicidally ambitious true artfag endeavours constantly, or it should be just be making great quality stuff that's solid and hits lots of real bases well for the masses to employ lots of people, enable some expression (whoever got to design sweatervest catmancop is surely very appreciative of their job), move money around, make people happy.
If guys like Kojima being allowed to make gigabudget supergames is ascended AAA, this is at least
light AAA, while
dark AAA is the Call of Duty mines, and some poor bastards being forced to spend years of their lives making
Immortals of Aveum.
China's AAA gacha is a good industry. Shining example of what actually cynical corporate interest driven video games look like. That should lead to results that are frictionless, pleasant, almost universally appealing and easy to get into. People who blame corporate ruthlessness for the western industry producing a lot of unplayable dogshit are confused. That's not cynicism. That's sheer incompetence. When it's not malevolence paired with USAID making financial success an outright non-factor in production considerations.
They can spend a gajillion dollars and man-hours animating the catcop because he's going to make it back. Because he's great.