Quality costs. Be it 20 or 30 for indie or 60/70 for AAA.
true, but not everything has to be a gigantic high budget cinematic experience to be a quality game... I'd know, because Pizza Tower is coming out in a couple weeks and that game is looking to be the best 2d platformer i'll ever get my hands on.
The problem is that on this board especially if something isn't super pretty and has lots of flashy cutscenes running at 4k60 it immediately gets forgotten. The disparity between AAA and regular games is so high that the AA market is now genuinely nearly nonexistent, the closest equivalent we have being indie games being funded by AAA studios (kena, psychonauts, sifu, stray etc) and even then people just call those AAA.
Vampire Survivors got laughed at and compared to a flash game, people call everything they see in showcases 'indie trash', even the so called AAA games like Street Fighter 6 and Resident Evil 4 Remake are getting dunked on, peoples standards are becoming unreasonably high. THAT'S the stuff that's devaluing games, not gamepass. Don't get me wrong i still have my qualms with the service (i think it's causing MS to not bother to try with First party since Gamepass is what they're selling their system on) but the simple fact is that prices and budgets are soaring way too fast and people's expectations as a result are becoming so inflated, that games that try to be their own thing get drowned out (unless it's something with ungodly brand recognition like Mario or Zelda, which is why Nintendo is an exception as they always are.)
The only way these types of games even get mainstream attention or success is if they get trendy, but that has its own host of issues.