AAA is just cash grab, they haven't been good or innovative games for a long, long time now. They are very good at marketing to the masses though and they have the pricing tiers laid out perfectly to extract as much money from people as they can.

They start off with their massive price tag like $70-80, plus the deluxe editions for $100-120 for any suckers who want a fucking extra skin. Then after a couple months when sales slow down, they put it on sale for like 20% off, then a couple months more, its like 40% off and so on. DLC has kind of fallen off, as they get people stuck in the battle pass and cosmetic buying loop instead (people are crazy).

If a AAA game looks interesting to you at all, you are literally best just waiting a few months or more, it's a win-win, you either buy it it's actual value or you get the reviews that its a disgusting broken mess or was completely over-hyped (it's these last two 99% of the time).