For me the main problem with indie games is the amount of value you get for your money.
Games are software, if you sell 10 copies or 10 million, it’s basically the same amount of work. That is: no matter how big your development budget is, or how many you expect to sell, 100% of that budget goes into developing 1 copy of the game.
However, the actual budget does scale with the number of expected sales. A game that is expected to sell 5M copies is going to have a much larger budget than a game that is expected to sell 10k copies. Add to that the lower price of indie games and there is a huge budget difference.
The end result of this is that as a gamer I can choose between a €20 indie game representing maybe €500k of development effort, or an €80 AAA game that represents €200M of development effort. The AAA game may cost me 4 times as much, but it gives me 400 times the value.
Games are software, if you sell 10 copies or 10 million, it’s basically the same amount of work. That is: no matter how big your development budget is, or how many you expect to sell, 100% of that budget goes into developing 1 copy of the game.
However, the actual budget does scale with the number of expected sales. A game that is expected to sell 5M copies is going to have a much larger budget than a game that is expected to sell 10k copies. Add to that the lower price of indie games and there is a huge budget difference.
The end result of this is that as a gamer I can choose between a €20 indie game representing maybe €500k of development effort, or an €80 AAA game that represents €200M of development effort. The AAA game may cost me 4 times as much, but it gives me 400 times the value.