It's not so much that Nintendo is massive... it's that they don't FIRE their devs after every project. Miyamoto, Sakurai, Aonuma, etc. have all been working at that company for DECADES.

They are MASTER artisans, in the same way a carpenter becomes one over a lifetime.

The games industry outside of a very select few companies like Valve, Nintendo, Insomniac, etc. DEVOUR people and churn through them at a completely horrific pace.

Constant crunch, burnout, underpaid, firing as soon as a game's profit chart shows even a slight slowdown... all that results in a broken pipeline where you always have 20-something-year-old interns being paid dogshit who are desperate to keep their job working 60 hour weeks and hoping they can jump ship to a better studio before they get shit-canned... and then bailing on the industry completely.

Even hit game making celebrities like Cliff Blezinski, John Carmack, and other relatively well-known game devs either no longer work at their hit studios, or have left the industry all-together.

The reason it's shit now, is because those who own the studios think making games is more like the textile industry or people working as cogs in a burger factory than any sort of artisan work... so they have reshaped it to be one where people are expendable and replaced constantly by bright-eyed young folks excited to work on their dream IP for them.

It's just finally catching up as the owners' boundless greed has only continued and conditions have worsened for the actual game makers.

It's not going to improve until the current way of making games is completely overturned and regulated in such a way where those who work on games can have their careers grow in the same way other artisan fields can - where they apprentice under masters who teach them the ropes, and who slowly gain knowledge and skill over many game projects they ship under the banner of one company - and they get royalties and other real tangible benefits for their hard work.

Nintendo is a MASSIVE game company, indie game companies could never produce their games the way Nintendo does. What a confounding example you chose from a company that is notably hostile to hobbiests and indie developers.

When Nintendo came out with the wii, they were laughed out of the room by Sony and MS because their games were too simple and graphics lacking... it was a huge success, that is what I meant... plenty of small, indie even, video game studios have and can produce huge hits... more importantly, they do not need to make a kajillion dollars to break even which means their games are not akin to armed robbery

Large game companies can create games that would be impossible for smaller indie studios to make, large game studios can offer employment of a nature that smaller indie game companies simply can’t.

I am not refuting that... I am refuting your claim that not having AAA games means the video game golden age is over... AAA video games have been mostly pain in the last 7 years... we can have tons of fun with no AAA titles

You are saying "If Mercedes Benz collapses, cars are over"... I am saying "there are plenty of other car makers to keep the industry as a whole"

I love indie games, don’t try to take the high road of claiming you have made yourself more pure by only playing indie games as if that was a solution, they are different categories.

Never claimed any of that... simply said I have fun with them and won't miss AAA games

Don’t conflate workplace culture with the basic reality of working at a riskier, smaller company vs. a larger established company with longer and more predictable product development cycles. You wanna start a family while working at a tiny company that could go POOF if only one or two things go wrong.

What AAA Studio are you thinking of? which one has NOT laid off tons of people as soon as their very successful launches cash in?