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Comment by ViktorRay | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know about this. I feel like nowadays it is just as rare for an indie game to be truly creative.

There are certain genres that the big AAA studios basically pump out and certain genres that indie devs basically pump out.

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Indie games often cater to whatever the devs found fun as kids, that kind of creates it's own kind of stagnation.

The indie boom of the late 00s and early 10s was to a certain degree the result of odd creatives working the Flashgame community (cut-throat in itself) being forced out onto other platforms as it died combined with other platforms providing monetization possibilities.

As with everything, once there was money to be found the vultures moved in.

I guess the question is what is "truly creative" for you? Does Half-Life Alyx count? How about the original Half-Life? Pong? Outer Wilds?

To me the likelyhood of a creative game coming from AAA studio is less likely than indie. Basically the same as movies. It can happen, but a truly creative game/movie/story is hard to come by in any sense. Was it the Ilyiad?

While the philosophy is always interesting on what an original thought is, in this context most folks use terms like "truly creative" as a proxy for "something folks enjoy that doesn't feel like a copy of something else". Emphasis on _feel_.

yea, if thats the case then I feel that AAA studios release creative things all the time. GTA for example, Alyx to name two. I guess it is always easier to buy creativity when you are a giant studio.

What, Alyx is literally "Half-Life, but in VR". It's fiarly polished but the concept is not creative at all. They barely even pushed the overall series plot forward and there's like one whopping new character.

The most recently released GTA game is over a decade old, it's a big stretch for it to fit "nowadays".

Even Alyx is 6 years old, if that's your best example of an innovative AAA game, you're already in trouble.

I agree.

The required investment is just a lot larger in AAA. So just from a risk management perspective, people look to reduce the risk level.

Doesn’t really lend itself to creativity unless people involved have a track record.

I think there is still roughly the same number of worthwhile games that get released each year, they are just buried by a ever increasing pile of shit.

This has been my feeling as well. Even less so actually. There are realllly good games release nowadays. Like literally insane level of quality. But you also get an insane amount of stinkers. And those stinkers are increasingly coming from AAA studies.

I'm not so pessimistic: while the ratio is getting worse, there are more good and interesting games coming out, and the best ones are getting better.

Or what the indie space is complaining about recently: copycats as soon as they show anything of their ostensibly original idea, vibe coded and released with a similar name as soon as possible.

Which isn't a new problem, it's just a lot faster and more prevalent. I really hope Valve (the premier marketplace for PC and indie games, alongside Itch) cracks down on it and hands out things like a "seal of quality" to separate slop from serious attempts at making games.

(because they earn money from everything and they have no real competition they don't actually crack down on slop, just like the various app stores don't care much about shovelware as long as it earns them money).

There is shovelware at any level, but at the same time I think indie games have been a more consistent stream of good memorable entries than big budget studios the last 10 years.

I really have to rack my mind to find think of anything that I feel has been memorable the last decade, and even then half of them are AA titles (and many Japanese, dunno if it's the gambare ethos or what's up with that, maybe I'm a closet weeb). Nioh 2. KCD2. Expedition 33. Yakuza: Like A Dragon but not the sequel. The Elden Ring DLC. Prey 2017. Doom 2016 and Eternal. I guess Stalker 2 has been getting pretty good too.

For good indie games I can drop dozens of names without stopping to think. There's Hollow Knight and Silksong, Hedon, The Drifter, Lunacid, Cruelty Squad, Voin, Paradise Killer, Blue Prince, Fallen Aces, Not For Broadcast, Heaven's Vault, Chants of Sennaar, Dead Cells, Blasphemous, Immortality, Axiom Verge, The Blind Prophet, Cross Code, Cultist Simulator, Astalon, Dread Delusion, The Witness, The Signifier, ... I can keep going.

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