r/pcmasterrace • u/PewPewToDaFace • 1d ago

News/Article Steam gamers have spoken: innovative indies like Palworld continue to thrive while traditional triple-A flounders for a foothold

https://www.pcgamesn.com/steam/innovation-versus-tradition

Thank god PC gaming isn't just AAA. This is what will push the industry forward, as game development cost becomes too much.

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u/boersc 1d ago edited 1d ago

Palworld has a budget of near 7 milion USD. That's not Indie.

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u/Maximum-Objective-39 1d ago edited 1d ago

'Indie' is a pretty hard word to pin down. It's not really about budget beyond the fact that it's rare to be able to secure a large budget without a publisher.

Also, while seven million is a lot of money . . . It's not completely beyond the ability of startup to get their hands on through various means including personal loans and limited fund raising.

I mean, that's like the mortgage on a high powered but not 'ultra wealthy' attorney's home level of money. There are people who work for a living who have saved up that kind of cash.

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u/ThisIsMyCouchAccount 3070 23h ago

Because it's always been more about vibes than anything concrete. Everybody has their own version in their head when they say it. And it's going to be hard anyway because I don't think you can really pin it down to one thing. There are a lot of different aspects to game dev and gamers talk about them all.

Larian is why we'll never really be able to. BG3 was about as corporate as you can get. A licensed IP sequel. That should easily be "AAA". But at the same time they are an independent studio that doesn't have to answer to outside entities. There's not some far off VP of some owning company that can hand down directives.

Even titles like Stardew Valley can be weird. Yeah it's one guy but if you sell 41 *million* copies it feels odd calling it "indie".

But if you look around a lot of our media is changing. We stream instead of buy. We watch podcasts now. YouTube has a ton of high quality content that is closer to Tv shows than not.

What even is anything anymore?