In the past, making money and making great games had a lot of overlap.

But then the big studios realized how much some people are willing to spend on either the latest version of the same thing, to not have to wait for a timer, to skip a grind (especially one tuned specifically to make people want to skip it), to gain an advantage over other players, plus a bunch of psychological tricks and are so often chasing that money, which probably kills a lot of the passion for their staff that actually knows how to make good games until they either leave or start phoning it in.

But indie studios, while they can also be run by people just chasing the money, can also be run by people more interested in the creating a great game aspect than the money aspect.

You can see the same thing across the entire economy. The main difference is that regulatory capture and the amount of resources required to make a video game aren’t set up to prevent new players from entering the market and since games are digital they scale much easier than physical objects. Like some people have de-enshitified their cars or even made their own from scratch or an older one, but it’s not like they can just sell those de-enshitified cars to anyone, they’d need to ramp up production quite a bit to get the same reach viral indie games can get.

Unfortunately indie devs just don’t have the resources to make the kinds of immersive story games I really like (think Uncharted, TLoU, Horizon Zero Dawn, etc.)

Valheim v1.0 just came out

At this point the only AAA games I touch are those from at least 10 years ago. Warframe and PoE2 scratch the AA/live service itch without overstaying their welcome, and for everything else, indie releases have it covered.

Been working through a bunch of new and older titles this year - in the past month or two alone I sunk so much time into Look Outside, Inscryption, and Endacopia, and just picked up Sprawl Zero which looks phenomenal. I’m working through the MGS series right now which I’ve somehow never played (hence the “older AAA” exception), and got a good handful of backlog selections lined up for after this binge.

I played marvel snap cuz of the draft release. I saw so many predatory practices I ought right uninstalled the game once draft was over

Good source of free real indie games (even the Portal devs are from there, hired by Valve after presenting Narbacular Drop there)

https://games.digipen.edu/

yeah, a land of creativity like metroidvania #3764917. ok, that was a bit cynical, but lets not pretend like indie is bastion if endless creativity, but I admit that the lack of dependency makes the creativity much easier there.