[maxrecursion]

Game development is in a really weird place. Insanely over-saturated but almost all AAA games are extremely derivative, stale, bland games with a coat of pretty graphics

Indie games are awesome right now, but they don't have the budgets to produce AAA games. So there is a huge gap. Innovative indie games with cool, new gameplay concepts, but always simple or retro graphics, and AAA games with shiny graphics on the other end but gameplay that hasn't changed in over a decade.

I'm just waiting for any AAA studio to provide something new with the AAA games. Maybe AI to improve NPCs in an open world game? Anything besides the same old gameplay with new skins on it.

[somenameforme]

It's just risk aversion. Companies want to turn video games into a factory line golden goose, but struggle to reconcile that each iteration through that factory line makes the final product relatively worse and worse, even if it continues to look better and better. Now even Call of Duty can't find a Call of Duty killer. But these same companies are terrified of trying anything new because new things do, on occasion flop. It would also entail scrapping the factory line, because creating a new game, instead of reskinning and old with a few new tweaks, is a way different beast.

That said, I don't really think the stereotypes of indie games are very valid anymore. Valheim looks great, has a massive open world, and is multiplayer. [1] It also started entirely as a result of one guy's pet project, until he grabbed a coworker and then set off to make it what it became. The graphics are stylized, but I think in a broadly aesthetically appealing way, as opposed to e.g. pixel graphics which are very off-putting to many people, myself among them. Pixel graphics came from an era of CRTs with interlaced scanning, and various other visual artifacts, that naturally blurred, antialiased, and blended them. Sharp jaggy edges never really existed, and I fail to understand why that's a popular style now.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSVbXgBJIuI

[raxxorraxor]

Some game concepts are fairly well developed. A shooter like Call Of Duty is such a concept, so making a competitor is far more difficult. Sure, you can make up with setting and presentation.

But otherwise very true, true innovation happens in the indie world and the maximal complexity of these type of games is steadily rising due to better tools and maybe soon AI support.

[mvdtnz]

For me indie gaming is going through its own aggravating phase right now, but it seems most people aren't bothered by it. The quality of the games is better than ever, but every indie title now goes through Early Access, sometimes for several years. By the time the game is released the hype cycle has already finished.

For people like me who play games just a couple of hours a week, I have no interest in playing an unfinished game. I have a library of games bigger than I could ever play and I will always skip the EA stuff.

[johnnyanmac]

>every indie title now goes through Early Access, sometimes for several years.

That mostly shows the realities of indie development. These games have less staff and need less sales to succeed, but they take much longer as indies lack the time (some do development on the side to a full time gig), manpower, or (sometimes) talent to get things done quickly.

>I have a library of games bigger than I could ever play

Well that proves the point. we also get more indies than ever. I don't think EA would give us more finished games. We'd just get less released games full stop. Even if you never play them I'm not sure if I'd call that a good thing.

[Goronmon]

Insanely over-saturated but almost all AAA games are extremely derivative, stale, bland games with a coat of pretty graphics...

People have been saying this for decades at this point. I'm not seeing it.

Innovation is largely overrated. It can be a good thing, but the vast majority of games, whether AAA or indie, can't be truly innovative. And innovative doesn't translate directly to a game being enjoyable. Conversely, a game being "derivative" doesn't automatically make the game not fun to play.

[bart_spoon]

Agreed. In video games, "innovation" quickly becomes "niche". Microsoft actually has a wider variety of games and genres represented on the Xbox, many highly praised, but frequently gets lambasted for having no games because the the overwhelming majority of players aren't actually interested in them. Sony on the other hand is dominating, and yet its biggest titles are all somewhat similar to each other and none of them really do anything new or interesting, they simply have a lot of polish.

[_mlbt]

Spot on. I want Elder Scrolls 6 to basically be Skyrim in a stunning new location, with better graphics.

Ditto for Forza Horizon 6 and the next installment of The Witcher.

[badsectoracula]

If past history is any indication, TES6 will be to Skyrim fans what Skyrim was to Oblivion fans which was what Oblivion was to Morrowind fans. Daggerfall fans are split about Morrowind though and i'm not sure there are any Arena fans.

[dvngnt_]

the morrowind fans are turning in their graves

[margorczynski]

Well it got dumbed down and casualized. Don't even get me started what they did to Fallout...

[_mlbt]

To be honest, I like my RPGs dumb and casual. Real life uses enough of my brain power and I’m trying to escape.

[hbn]

AAA basically just means nice graphics at this point. You can't dump more money into a piece of art to make it better, that's why all the innovation comes from indie games. Look at Balatro, a guy made a poker roguelike and became a millionaire overnight. I think if big game studios, rather than dumping their copious amounts of money into single, giant-scope games, dealt it out amongst a variety of smaller teams for smaller-scoped projects, they'd be way better off.

Everyone keeps suggesting AI NPCs. I'm sure someone's gonna take a crack at it and it'll go about as well the Humane AI pin or the Rabbit R1 before everyone realized how horrible of an idea it is. If anything it'll make for a silly novelty like the VR games where you clumsily try to perform basic tasks with VR motion controls. But in this case you argue with an in-game LLM and see how quickly you can make it get defensive or start gaslighting you with made up facts about household cleaners you can combine to make a delicious cocktail.

[_mlbt]

It’s nice graphics, but it’s also voice acting, and robust storytelling that sets a good AAA game apart from indie games for me.

Honestly even some of the indie games are getting pretty incredible graphics these days thanks to Unreal Engine.

[phone[phone]]

I'd rather see studios make 100 games that each cost $2 million to make than one $200 million game.

[johnnyanmac]

Thing is 2M doesn't quite get you as far as you think. You get 10 devs (let's say, 4 programmers, 4 artists, 2 designers), pay them 100k each (which is lowballing it in med/high COL areas), and work 2 years. That's 2.4m just from labor, before advertising and other duties like community outreach. Sell for $30 (which is basically the top end of an "indie) and you need 80k copies to break even, more after platform cuts.

That's definitely a scale a AAA studio can afford, but far from what we associate "indie" with in our heads.That's where the exploitation begins.

[JetSpiegel]

That's more devs than made Doom, Deus Ex, Fallout(?).

[johnnyanmac]

The original games in the 90's? Yeah, probably. But cost of living was very different (so even if they made > 100k after adjusting for inflation, it went a lot farther), and the standards of games were much lower.

You can definitely make Doom 1993 with 1-3 people today (and without crunch). Making Doom 2016 levels of fidelity (even if we ignore the excellent optimization) would still be a very lofty task for 10 people. We still don't really have that many "full stack game devs" that can work at that scope and fidelity to bring the team size down.

[ProfMeowsworth]

We have both of that, right now.

[npinsker]

> I think if big game studios, rather than dumping their copious amounts of money into single, giant-scope games, dealt it out amongst a variety of smaller teams for smaller-scoped projects, they'd be way better off.

This is what game publishers do, and many of them are struggling too. It’s harder than it seems to pick winning horses. (Though in this case, it may be partially because more and more skilled teams are opting to self-publish.)

[chucke1992]

> I think if big game studios, rather than dumping their copious amounts of money into single, giant-scope games, dealt it out amongst a variety of smaller teams for smaller-scoped projects, they'd be way better off.

Big publishers tried and did not succeed much. EA, Square Enix, T2 with Private Division and so on.

[w1nst0nsm1th]

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1931770/Chants_of_Sennaar...

Some independant studio or publishers have their fans base : Amanita Design, Playdead, Zachtronics, Devolver Digital, Annapurna Interractive are for me the folk to watch.

[chucke1992]

Oh for sure. AAA games require too much effort and too much returns while indies can spend 1 year and 1 person and deliver hit being multiple time more profitable.

[Log_out_]

Everyone waits for AAAi to arrive so that indy gaming can have that polished shell.