I was thinking about this the other day and it seems to me survival games have to be a lot faster and therefore cheaper to develop than many other genres. The gameplay loop comes pre-designed and there's generally far less in the way of writing or voice acting to complete, most of the games being primarily sandboxes. Voice acting is supposedly one of the most expensive aspects of making games so that would be a big saving all on its own.

There's often not even a lot of work to do in terms of creating structured content. There's the environment to create (Although some survival games use a lot of automation for that.) and the various crafting, skill and gear progression systems, but those are all what you could call infrastructure. Most games have to do all of that even before they get to what they call the actual "content", whereas a survival game is about ready to go once those parts are done. Nightingale looks to have a lot more written content than Palworld but even then I very much doubt it would compare to a themepark MMORPG, which has to have a huge number of quests, dungeons and raids, even at launch.

Basically, something like Valheim or Palworld looks like it would be *far* easier to put together than something like Tarisland or even Genshin Impact. How it compares to looter-shooters like Destiny, I wouldn't know, since I don't play them, but from what I read those also seem to have a good deal of structured content. The real proof of the argument seems to be how quickly survival games reach a marketable state after being announced and how playable they are even in Early Access. Other genres seem to take far longer to get to the same point.