Tell me you don't make games without telling me you don't make games.

You can make perfectly good games, yes. But good luck making anything AAA like that. The games you're talking about are indie or niche. For example, they will have no mocap.

And even in those cases, there is a difference between "cost to start a studio" and "cost to develop a game". The costs you're talking about are the cost of getting started. Those are barrier to entry costs, not development costs. When we talk about development costs, we typically talk about everything after you have all the hardware and software you need. Studios already have those things so they barely factor into the ongoing development costs

Also you only don't need proprietary dev kits if you have no intention of doing per-platform QA. Fine for indies. Not fine for AAA

Yes, the barrier to entry has gone down; the minimum cost to ship something, anything, is lower than ever....but only by comparison to the peak cost. Even small indie studios are spending as much as studios did when making $60 NES games