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this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2025
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While I agree, listing successful games is just confirmation bias. For every indie darling, you’ve got hundreds of flops.
The reason triple a games are so mediocre is because it’s safe. You dont have to take a huge risk, and your chances of failing are smaller. Even if you do fail, the chances of recouping your investment are pretty decent.
Again, I think indie games are generally better than pretty much anything the triple a scene puts out. But that’s because they took a huge risk that happened to pay out.
And the reason it has to be safe is not just because of investors, but because they're giant companies structured for making big games. You can't use a full team of UI designers on a small indie game with a fast development cycle. You can't really split those resources up among 100 tiny projects either. So if you want to make use of your big company and your in-house engine and all that, you have to make a billion dollar game and it has to earn back that money and it can't take any risks.
Let's say the ratio is 1/5. Rather investing in 5 diverse small - medium projects @ 2 to 5 million each or in one big 20 million project with a increased risk for bad management decisions and safe (boring) story & mechanics which leads to at best ok ratings? I would choose the former but i'm not a CEO type.
The problem is, it’s nowhere near 1:5. It’s more like 1:100 if we include only games with a decent amount of effort put in.
Ok let's use those numbers:
Let's say the ratio is 1/100. Rather investing in 100 diverse small - medium projects @ 2 million each or in one big 200 million project with a increased risk for bad management decisions and safe (boring) story & mechanics which leads to at best ok ratings? I would choose the former but i'm not a CEO type.