If you attracted 430,000 players (assuming they all paid $50 a box) - which is the EQ number -, you could only afford a $10 million dev + marketing (combined) budget to pay itself off in box sales (assuming a mostly digital distribution mix). That is just to break even. In order to made a reasonable return, the development budget would need to be more like $6 million plus 1-2 million of marketing. You aren't getting 430,000 people to buy the game you want, for $50, on a $6-7 million dev budget AND pay a sub fee for a long enough period of time (which is where the real return would happen). That just isn't happening.
Go look at what Shroud of the Avatar is doing on $4 million on dev budget and that is (roughly) what you can buy. Plus it is even being made in Austin, which is much cheaper than California or the east coast, so you are really getting good bang for your buck. Camelot Unchained is $2 million+.
If you want higher production values (higher poly / better textures / etc), double the budget easily. Now we are talking a million players. Your game isn't selling to a million players. A million people don't want to waste their time regging up, or spending an hour LFG. There is too much other choice. Just look at the types of games that make money now. Either super cheap to make indie games, mass appeal games with large budgets or free-to-play games with a moderate budget.
You can take your pick as to which of those buckets you want your game to be in: Indie (e.g. looks like SotA or CU), Mass Appeal (the high production values) or F2P (medium production values, but different business model). That is the reality of the industry. Also, the industry is FAR from failing. More money and more games are being made than ever before -- at astounding growth rates (both foreign and domestic). The only thing that is failing are games that cannot keep people's attention. Those games fail HARD. There is just too much choice otherwise.
By the way, that doesn't mean it needs to be a theme park, rails MMO. It just means YOU HAVE TO HAVE RELEVANT SOLO PLAYER CONTENT.
