Yeah, I saw an article recently that Blood of the Dawnwalker cost "just" $40 million to create. I thought the phrasing was intended to be ironic, but no apparently that's not even AAA by today's standards. I don't know the exact costs, but my instinct is that quite a lot of it probably went into things that would not have been possible to just automate with AI and end up with the same level of quality.

Expedition 33 was made in ~4 years and was known to have used AI assets as placeholders during development (even left some in for the final build). It also used Unreal Engine's Metahuman for facial animation which uses ML. It was 2025 Game of the year.

I mean they definitely exist, just look at Steam. 10s of 1000s of shovelware games that no one wants or buys or plays.