I sure it's possible to get $100,000 of budget for a new game as team of 5 people to release it within 6-12 moinths. Even without much of track record it's doable if you have cool prototype. But I pretty certain no one will ever give money to yet unknown solo developer to release the same game in 2-3 years.
Yet modern tools become better and better every year and even for $100-500 you can buy enough of assets to build something that look good enough in 3D. There are just certain genres and art styles that just require larger team.
When you do pixel art you cant just buy bunch of art packs and expect them to work together. And for anything high-quality you'll be creating all the art from scratch for every project.
Of course I not talking about very basic 8-bit stuff, but about something that is actually looks good and well animated.