With current hardware and tools, it becomes much cheaper to reach graphics quality that is 10 or 15 years old, so such game would be just enough and be profitable enough.

I think that high quality rendering is reaching a tipping point where it's mostly of diminishing returns, this means AAA studios could differentiate with good graphics, but this becomes less and less true.

Gameplay matters, and the innovation is not the on the side of AAA studios.