The comparison is actually more valid than it sounds.
Like the movie industry, it's becoming easier and cheaper than ever to make professional-looking films, but making "A-grade" blockbusters is becoming more and more expensive.
This sort of transition inevitably hurts the biggest-budget producers, as they're forced to spend more and more money to compete. Similarly, it helps the lowest-budget producers, as they can make millions of dollars off what would have been 10 years ago been considered a hobby project.
People tend to look at the most absurdly successful indie games like Braid, Touhou, or Minecraft and dismiss them as one-hit wonders or exceptions to the rule. But how many exceptions to the rule it takes before the rule becomes invalid -- especially as games begin to compete more and more on features besides graphics?
Many of these features are cheaper to develop and benefit from the agility and risk-taking abilities of a smaller development team as opposed to the designed-by-seventeen-committees-in-separate-cupboards approach of the big game studios.
Like the movie industry, it's becoming easier and cheaper than ever to make professional-looking films, but making "A-grade" blockbusters is becoming more and more expensive.
This sort of transition inevitably hurts the biggest-budget producers, as they're forced to spend more and more money to compete. Similarly, it helps the lowest-budget producers, as they can make millions of dollars off what would have been 10 years ago been considered a hobby project.
People tend to look at the most absurdly successful indie games like Braid, Touhou, or Minecraft and dismiss them as one-hit wonders or exceptions to the rule. But how many exceptions to the rule it takes before the rule becomes invalid -- especially as games begin to compete more and more on features besides graphics?
Many of these features are cheaper to develop and benefit from the agility and risk-taking abilities of a smaller development team as opposed to the designed-by-seventeen-committees-in-separate-cupboards approach of the big game studios.