Why I like Indie games more than Triple-A games?

8 min readOct 16, 2017

Bunch of different indie game characters

Video games have been an important part of many people’s childhood including mine. You can ask many children and they will tell you one game that they remember playing as a child. Video games has evolved over the years for better and worst but one thing that does not change will be the love that people have for video games.

Thousands of people attending Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) (Picture taken from VG 24/7)

The video game industry is a billion dollar industry with around 100+ games released every year. There are huge conventions like E3 and Gamescom running for days with 50,000+ visitors. The video game industry can be divided into many different divisions but the biggest two divisions are the Triple-A games and the indie games.

My Background

Firstly, I am not a game journalist. I am not a pro-gamer. I am not a twitch streamer or Youtuber playing games. I am not an expert about video games. I am just an avid gamer who loves playing video games in my free time. It just a few hours a day but it helps with those stressful and difficult days.

I started loving games when I was around 8 years old. I would sit on my brother’s bed and watch him play games like Half Life and No One Lives Forever (Please make a sequel). We played all our initial games on PC. We did not have a Super Nintendo, N64, PS1 nor Nintendo Gamecube. My first console was the original Xbox so we entered the console life quite late but I have played all the classic video games on my PC using emulators. After the Xbox, I have gotten a console in every subsequent generation like PS3 and PS4. I also had handheld consoles like Nintendo DS so I could play both GameBoy and DS games. I used to play all the big Triple-A titles like God of War, Batman: Arkham Series, Tomb Raider, etc. Lately, I have fallen off Triple-A titles and playing games from Indie developers like Rocket League, Shovel Knight, Super Meat Boy, etc.

Triple-A Games

There are so many well-known gaming studios around the world. Just to name some:

Rockstar (Creator of Grand Theft Auto)
Naughty Dog (Creator of Uncharted and Last of Us)
Valve (Creator of Portal and Half-Life)
Ubisoft (Creator of Far-Cry and Assassin Creed)

Aside from these, there are many more studios and they try to produce as many games as possible. These are the studios that make Triple-A games which means a huge amount of budget for development and marketing. Some people term AAA as A lot of resources, A lot of time and A lot of money. I find this terminology bogus completely as the main factor comes down to budget. One big thing is Triple-A games need to sell a lot to earn profit due to the immense budget behind it. As seen by numbers, many Triple-A games do well as they are known franchises or they are published by well-known game studios.

Indie Games

On the other hand, indie games are developed by smaller, lesser-known gaming studios. Sometimes, these games are developed by only one person like Five Nights at Freddy’s (FNaF). If I mention some names, you will probably not know them. Do you know Pinokl Games (Party Hard) or Studio MDHR (Cuphead)? Do you know Toby Fox (Undertale) or Scott Cawthon (FNaF)? If you do, you have a good knowledge about indie games.

Normally, these games are not the usual Triple-A full price $59.99. Thus, if they sell as much as the Triple-A titles, it will not generate that much revenue. This lower price makes sense as they are not established gaming studios and their games might not have a lot of content. Rather, they can be finished in a couple of days. On the other side, they are usually just few people so each person takes a bigger cut. The usual costs are the publishing costs, the rent of engine cost and each individual living costs. Thus, in that sense, they make a profit more easier but they taking a bigger risk.

Indie vs. Triple-A

From my opinion, I prefer indie games over Triple-A games. I am not trying to be a hipster. I have just started leaning more over to the indie side. This does not mean that I am only playing indie games; I still play some Triple-A titles. I played Horizon Zero Dawn just recently and I am probably going to play Star Wars Battlefront II (because I am a Star Wars fan) and Far Cry 5. You must be thinking why I prefer indie game. Well, let’s analyze the two genres.

First thing, right out of the bat, it is the innovation by the indie developers. They think some of the coolest ideas for games or cool ways to play games. In Brothers: Tale of Two Sons, you use each analog stick on the joystick to control a brother. In Rocket League, you are playing football (Soccer for the Americans) with different types of cars. Well, you probably will not see this type of innovation a whole lot in the big gaming studios. As these big gaming studios have an agenda of trying to make money, they cannot take risks by making games like these. They know what works and continue with that which you can see with the sequels, spin-offs and remakes of previous games. They will try to add new elements but they cannot change it a lot due to backlash from the public and the higher-ups. For indie developers, they are their own bosses and they can take these small risks. I am not saying that they are work but they are amazing when they do work out well.

Second thing, it is the amazing development. What do I mean by the amazing development? I mean the amazing story, the amazing soundtrack, the amazing visuals and the amazing overall game. In Cuphead, the visuals are done to look like 1930s cartoons. In Shovel Knight, the game is supposed to remind you of old 8-bit arcade games. You do not expect such a thing from current games with the availability of graphics card which can provide 4K visuals. In Ori and the Blind Forest, the story is beautiful that it makes you feel sad. I know that there are many Triple-A titles like Last of Us and BioShock Infinite. I know these stories are touching but there are many titles that ignore it for multiplayer. In the indie scene, some games are just made to tell a story. In Undertale and Don’t Strave, the main attraction is the replay value with a new experience and it does not require multi-player or other people. Usually, Triple-A titles only have the story mode that they need to go through many times with different difficulties but this is simply doing the story, nothing else. In Undertale, your second replay has consequences based on your previous run. Each indie game has one outstanding element but their other parts are still good so the overall experience is still great unlike most Triple-A titles.

Ori and the Blind Forest by Moon Studios

Final thing, it is the norm of the current video game industry. With the evolution of technology, video games have gotten better in many cases like better graphics, more content and online multiplayer. Along the way, triple-A video games have gotten worse with more bugs, microtransactions and downloadable content (DLC). In the past, developers had to make the game robust and mostly bug-free as they will not have the opportunity to fix them once they ship. Nowadays, games are released with a lot of bugs with like frame-rate issues or rendering problems which could have been avoided if the game got delayed for testing. Batman: Arkham Knight had really bad frame-rate issues on desktops while Assassin Creed: Origins was full of bugs which caused players to get stuck. These games have a deadline presented by the higher-ups and they need to match it which leads to games being released with such bugs. Aside from these, games were about putting your time to be rewarded but the work can be skipped using microtransactions. In GTA V, you can buy in-game currency using real money while you could do jobs and challenges to earn the money. Some games do it alright where the microtransactions are for appearances not leveling you up. The last issue is DLC where games used to be sold a complete game for full price. Nowadays, many games release for full price but you need to pay extra for DLC. Thus, you are not getting the complete game. Sometimes, the assets are on the disc and they unlock later when you paid for it. I am not saying DLC is bad as sometimes it provides some good content but the misuse of it has caused problems. Most indie games do not use DLC or microtransactions but the ones, which do use them, tend to not misuse it.

An example of an issue in Assassin Creed: Unity

A common argument is that indie games are not on par with the Triple-A games due to the resources. Some of those well-known developers in those big studios like Capcom decide to leave the big studios to make their own indie studios like Comcept. Undertale, Journey, Shovel Knight, Super Meat Boy and Ori and the Blind Forest all have been critically acclaimed where their metacritic scores are above 85%. These are games have scores on par with those Triple-A titles. As for sales, Minecraft, one of biggest indie games, has sold around 122 million copies for just being one game which is more than any Triple-A title. Well, Minecraft does have updates like DLC but other games do also but still Minecraft is still relevant till now.

In the end, it is not whether the game is a well-known franchise or has the best graphics. It comes down to whether it is enjoyable and you want to play it. Recently, indie games have been hitting it with their innovation and enjoyable gameplay. When a Triple-A title does well, it is expected. When an indie game does well, it gets huge traction like Undertale, Stardew Valley or Rocket League and this traction lasts longer than usual Triple-A titles due to the surprise and innovation. After all this, this article is my opinion.

Recommendations:

If you want to tryout some indie games, I have put some recommendations with links. These are still many more not in this list and you can find many on steam.

Sorry for not updating with new blogs. I got a bit busy. But, thank you so much for reading this one. Hopefully, you will come back to read my future blogs.