The phrase “indie games are better” is true and doesn’t mean “all indie games are better” it means “there is more good indie games than good dependent games”, and it also means “tripple-A products are mostly shit nowadays” as a bonus
When people say “Indie games are better” they don’t mean this as some universal truism, as if awful ones don’t exist. Of course they exist.
They mean that triple-A gaming has lost its way, and the soul of what is great about gaming is no longer found there, but in Indie.
Indie games are free to be just games - built with the intent of creating fun for the player, or telling a memorable story, or being interesting in whatever way the creator likes.
Triple A games are becoming only products, designed to make money. They are increasingly stuffed with mandatory accounts,microtransactions, DLC, and predatory gambling mechanics to keep players hooked while drip-feeding them dopamine.
The people at the top don’t care about games as creative expression, just games as a money product. If publishers could create ‘games’ without the annoyance of needing studios of developers or designers and creative types who have ‘vision’ and other bothersome things, they would. If they could just pull a lever and shit out another AI-generated turd, they’d do it.
Even single-player triple-A games aren’t immune. Despite enormous budgets games are coming out half-baked and bland, because they are made by a huge and disparate team who lost sight of the game’s vision because it’s too dilute, and they are overworked and being pressured to just fucking finish it already because we need this out in time to boost the Q4 shareholder results.
So yes.
“Indie games are better.”
It’s called Survivorship Bias and it’s very real.
There’s another part of “they don’t build them like they used to” that people don’t talk about, and that is the “Good 'Ol” products like toasters and tools from back in the day were an expensive luxury compared to what you can get today. If you shell out the money, you’ll get a darn good product that will last, but today’s technological advances have made it very cheap and easy to make a not-quite-as-good product that will still last a decent while.
There’s also planned obsolescence and I’m not gonna get into that.
Great illustration
Recently, I replayed an old Gameboy game that I got out of a bargain bin of some sort in the 90s. The game was bizarre and bad in ways only a bargain bin game could be, but like…it still works. The cart still works and nothing about the game was actually buggy. It just remains a not good game.
Unfortunately even the high end expensive stuff is still built for planned obsolescence in mind, still built to break after 10 years and the only options available, whether you go to big box store, specialty places, or direct from manufacturers, all have planned obsolescence built in and are more expensive to repair than just buying a new one. The $400 dishwasher and the $1400 dishwasher will still both only last 10 years.
Sure, although in this example, to be fair you have to try really hard to actually end up buying one of those games. Steam does a pretty good job not showing you complete crap
It is okay for art to be “bad”.
At least with indie stuff, people are risking less due to less money.
So good video games are pure numbers problem than it is a funding problem.
They should make a higher number of good games and a lower number of bad games.
They should also make more of the games I like and less of the ones I dont like.
I think this is a literal Asmondgold quote
