Quote Originally Posted by kupomogli View Post
And Ninja Theory isn't just your small indie dev team working out of their home.
Most "indie" developers aren't just a couple of people working out of a home basement. WayForward of the Shantae games is considered by most to be an independent developer and they just celebrated their 30th anniversary, and Infinite Fall who just formed to create and release the recent Night in the Woods made the game with around the same number of staff as Ninja Theory. It's a bit odd how they're all considered "indie" studios when their structure and size is how most game developers used to be decades ago, but that's what small studios are today.

So many "indie" kickstarters are made by industry professionals who have worked in gaming for decades, it's odd to consider these as independent like Bloodstained, Broken Age, Shenmue III, etc. The real small devs you're suggesting who are working out of a home are really close to homebrew programmers, and most releases are near unplayable as most of the Xbox Live Indie Games were. It's just that most of the styles or types of games I personally enjoy happen to be made by indie studios these days, it's not that I love indie studios over anything AAA by default.

I basically mentioned Hellblade as you mentioned that indie devs can't compete on making graphically intensive games, I found that's not necessarily the case as Ninja Theory did just that. They don't all have to be 2D or uniquely stylish in a graphically limited way.

Thank you for finding the budget for Hellblade, I tried finding it but couldn't. Their previous games weren't independently funded but I counted this one as they both funded it themselves with a lower budget and reduced the team size to a small number, so at this point they're basically on par with any other indie developer. They still managed to profit after selling 500,000 copies of Hellblade, which I think is a pretty reasonable amount to sell to recoup your costs in development. And then there's Electronic Arts who was "disappointed" when selling 7.3 million copies of Battlefield V as that wasn't enough. It's really hard for me to sympathise with AAA studios complaining about stuff like that when it was incredibly unrealistic for games to sell anywhere near that many in the past.

There's other good AAA games too, like the recent God of War for PS4. It looks like a well made game and I watched a playthrough of it, it's just not a game I feel I would want to play through myself. It's not that there's no good modern games, but I really have to struggle to think of any that interest me. Looking up Hellblade and God of War again reminded me of another aspect of modern games that I'm not a fan of, most games seem to have a skill tree of some type. Basically every type of game is treated as an RPG or has elements shoved in just to extend the game time through grinding, I don't like having to fiddle around with this stuff when I'm just trying to play a basic action or combat game. Thankfully Hellblade left that out, obviously because of budgetary reasons but the end result is more of an improvement in my opinion. My PC isn't powerful enough to play Hellblade but maybe someday I'll get around to it, otherwise I can watch a playthrough online.