Most large companies have and have been in business for decades. The key very much is driven by making what you can sell and understanding that well. Every bet is not necessarily a success but there are enough that are not only to sustain these companies but grow them.
Building what you want in the hope it's a crazy viral success is not a very good or sustainable business model. Pretending that these behemoths that employ well paid staff don't know what they are doing is just myopic. It's a long standing myth that you cannot know reasonably well what sort of game will succeed or work in such a way as to find it. But it's "selling out" to many, me included and I wish more people could find success on their own terms. That's just not the commercial reality though.
I worked at EA for years and have worked at other AAA studios, I've seen the big companies from the inside and know pretty well how they work, what they do well and what they don't.
Sure, EA continues to exist because it has more hits than misses (and is helped in that regard by huge, reliable annual franchises like FIFA) but I've seen plenty of projects with relatively low expectations become huge hits (like the original need for speed underground) as well as titles with high expectations crash and burn (I won't name names). The big companies do a good enough job to be fairly consistently profitable but they by no means have a foolproof formula for success. Show me a famous studio without titles that didn't meet expectations.
Building what you want in the hope it's a crazy viral success is not a very good or sustainable business model. Pretending that these behemoths that employ well paid staff don't know what they are doing is just myopic. It's a long standing myth that you cannot know reasonably well what sort of game will succeed or work in such a way as to find it. But it's "selling out" to many, me included and I wish more people could find success on their own terms. That's just not the commercial reality though.