[kkukshtel]

I know it sounds like I'm trying to hoist the majority of the complaints onto AAA, and I am, but like I mention in the article and have mentioned a few times on Twitter in other threads of the post, indies are susceptible to a lot of the same forces (if not more).

I really want to make it clear that my argument isn't "AAA BAD, INDIE GOOD", because that's far from the case. I even went back and added in some examples of indies eating each other towards similar ends, tracing the aping of Dorfromantik into two other games, and Vampire Survivors into 10 Minutes Till Dawn. There are still outliers for sure, but they are far from the norm. Also for as much as I love Disco Elysium (literally did a whole podcast series on it), it's far from "progressive" design and innovates more in the realm of tone / narrative. A lot of its appeal is that it is like older CRPGs.