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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   26896 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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In the last couple of year you can see in the gaming industry that small teams deliver great games and rake massive profit s - not that it hadn't happen before, but they are encroaching on AAA territory. If you can deliver the same as a massive bloated company at fraction of the costs - eventually someone will displace it.

On the other hand there are other parts of the gaming industry where the big breakthrough came from taking something relatively niche and low-budget and dumping huge amounts of money into it. To name two examples, Monster Hunter was fairly sizable as a franchise but was ticking over on PS2-era budgets by developing primarily for handhelds, then decided to go AAA for World and massively succeeded. Genshin Impact arrived in what was previously a low-budget Gacha gaming landscape and singlehandedly reshaped it, with a pricetag of $100m upfront and estimated $200m more a year since.

Returnal did pretty well by dumping a AAA budget into the roguelike genre.

Yeah Clair Obscur is amazing. I also do see this but that being said, most market share is still with massive games. There is more room for indie but these behemoth business aren't going to go under overnight.

Didn't Clair Obscur receive funding from multiple sources? Allegedly the list of backers included Microsoft, a French government program, etc. Not exactly "indie".

Also, the team was like 40 people + contractors. Thats AA on the smaller side, not indie.

It's not unusual for foreign games to be funded by that government (one example that comes to mind is The Long Dark).

Ok fair! I don't know the formal definitions of indie. They're small though for sure.

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