I feel like your post is predicated on this idea that if GAAS games fail then studios will go back to making single player AAA games. The economic realities of game development make that a difficult proposition. Creating a brand new AAA game from scratch these days takes a team of 250-500 people working for 4-5 years with the budgets touching 8 figures. And this is on the lower end of estimates. We've seen games needing up to 1000 people, costing 200+ million dollars and taking even longer. And the thing is, at the end of it all, the game has to be really good because it needs to sell several million copies to make money. That's the big gamble in all of this. If a studio spends all those resources and puts out a game that doesn't sell enough, investors will rightly not want to put in that much money all over again in the hope that they'll get a win after another 5 years. That's the crisis facing the AAA gamedev industry and is why every publisher is looking to find a GAAS hit and generally have continuous monetization from any game they actually put out.
Feels like the only companies that can justify the big budget single player experiences are the console platform holders. That's only because they a) make money from subscriptions, licensing and hardware and b) can sort of write off a loss because it attracts customers to their platform. And even they are all looking at continuous monetization for their games and services now. You think about a company like CD Projekt Red or Larian and honestly, they're living charmed lives right now, so to speak. Cyberpunk 2077 was a disaster at launch but fortunately for them it still sold like crazy and they have the benefit of being in a relatively lower cost country. If it had been an actual commercial failure then CDPR could have been in deep trouble. Larian fortunately got a blockbuster on their hands but their previous few games, while great, never really sold that many copies. It was enough to keep them going but that level of muted success might not have been enough for them to continue given the rising costs nowadays.
All this is to say that I don't see the pendulum swinging back to pure single player experiences and away from GAAS/continuous monetization until something happens that fixes the budgets of AAA games. On the bright side, there are still enough games like Yakuza or Hogwarts or BG3 to enjoy and hopefully games like Dragon's Dogma 2 or Homeworld will be mostly one and done experiences too.
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