Low budget indie games vs triple AAA games

I still often hear people saying that indie games on a budget cannot be as good as AAA games because they have fewer people working on them and less finance / resources, but just how many top quality indie games is it going to take before gamers stop thinking this way?

Over the last few years, the best games I have come across have all been Indie games. In no particular order, and only some examples of my favorites have been:

Braid, Bastion, Magicka, VVVVVV, Minecraft, Terraria, Defense Grid, Super Meat Boy, Binding of Issac, Path of Exile, SPAC (space pirates and zombies), and plenty of others that I can't remember off the top of my head.

On the other hand, I've bought just about every AAA release in the RPG and MMO genres, and the list of games that are personally equal to the ones above for me are:

*Empty list because there weren't any.

I tried Skyrim, Witcher 2, Diablo 3, Dragon Age Origins most of which were good games, but I found myself going back to the indie games above because these were all too lacking in someway. In particular AAA RPGs may as well just be renamed to 'fantasy action / first person fireball shooting dumbed down games' because that's what the genre has typically become. MMOs on the other may as well just be renamed too 'Well we promised our game would be different, but really its just a WoW clone'.

I don't understand how with the amount of money pumped into AAA games, and the number of people working on them, over time they become less and less decent, easier and simplified, and generally just clones of either first person shooter games or WoW, neither of which are kinds of games that I enjoy.

Well, all I can really say is that, if a painter doesn't love painting, his art is going to look like crap. Indie game developers get together to make games they love, and money comes later. Most AAA titles first priority is money, and they usually lack the soul that indie games have.

If the people who are in control of the game are out to make money, most of the time you'll get a game that is forced, rushed, dumbed down, and attempts to appeal to as many people as they can, so that they can collect a bigger paycheck.

Indie games focus on making the best game they can because they want to make a game that they love. That's the difference between AAA and Indie titles.

Well you are posting this in the forum of an Indy game so I have a suspicion you won't get much argument.

However! Mainstream games are generally far superior to indy games in areas like user interface polish, communications, socialization support, ease of use, accessibility, etc. There are, no doubt, exceptions. PoE isn't one. It has, instead, a much more complex game (at least in regards to character development) and a much steeper learning curve than would be tolerated in a mainstream product. It also mixes PvP and PvE elements in a way that would be incomprehensible to most mainstream developers (as would being free with no P2W).

I'm an open source gaming advocate in principle, so I'm kinda neutral in the indy vs triple A argument. Both suck as a model as far as I'm concerned. Then again, not many open source games of interest to choose from these days. Honestly neither Indy nor Triple-A game companies really want to deal with people like me. I have no serious ethical qualms about pirated games nor do I feel any obligation to donate money. I do, however, feel obligated to point out bugs or flaws when I run across them as well as trying to make constructive suggestions at times, so I'm not a total write off.

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Omnivore61 wrote:

However! Mainstream games are generally far superior to indy games in areas like user interface polish, communications, socialization support, ease of use, accessibility, etc.

Whether or not this is true, the only thing I look for in a game is gameplay and fun. I know that EA have a lot of social networking stuff and their own online communities and things like that, but if I dont enjoy playing the games then I'm not interested in any of that stuff.

The last thing I rate a game on is 'socialization', IMO the day that this became such an important part of video games was the day that their quality in terms of gameplay began to decline.

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Omnivore61 wrote:

It also mixes PvP and PvE elements in a way that would be incomprehensible to most mainstream developers (as would being free with no P2W).

After playing Guild Wars 1 for over 7 years, I cant understand why these concepts are so difficult to understand for mainstream developers. Games can still be very profitable and enjoy long term success with being free to play / buy to play without selling any P2W options, but as was already pointed out, the mainstream developers are over focused on trying to make as much money as they possibly can, and then everything else about their games is really just an afterthought.