Steam is full of shorter games with worse graphics made by indy devs. Guess what? No one gives a shit! Because no one needs crappy games from 1980-s.
Some of them are really succesful. Many people care. Others don’t.
Here the current Steam charts. Many indie games, some few with really low specs. Banana only needs 30MB RAM. Seems to be a great game. Hostly now, why are 50k people playing that “game” currently?
But back on topic: Yes, AAA games are more succesfull and earn much more money, but claiming “no one cares about indie” is stupid, when so many people play games like Rust, Stardew Valley, Prison Architect, Terraria, RimWorld, Valheim, The Forest, …
Games like Valheim and Rust are not some pixel art games which will run on a 2GB system with an integrated GPU, they’re pretty much AA games with an AA level publisher behind them. Yes, there are some real exceptions, like Stardew Valley, but you can count them on your fingers. They don’t make even a 1% of Steam catalogue. Thus my point still stands - no one cares about low end games.
Even if they don’t make up 1% of Steam’s catalogue (though I doubt that figure), they have had real impact.
It’s ok to not like them personally, but to say no one cares is disingenuous. Balatro doesn’t require much in terms of hardware but is having a real moment right now. Stardew Valley has been killing it for 8 years. People have thousands of hours in Rimworld.
Indie games are also great for community and modders.
I quite like many games with “poor” graphics. Perhaps not exclusively, but you’re seriously missing out if you only go for realistic-looking or detailed games. Give a few of those indie games a try, you might be surprised.
Edit: Oh, and terminal games are cool! Usually not very performant though.
This is data from 2020 https://www.statista.com/statistics/1356730/steam-indie-game-revenue-genre/ but I believe it’s still pretty relevant.
In short, indie games are the games no one is playing. A tiny fraction of indies bring more than $200k, while AA and AAA bring in millions and hundreds of millions.
The idea that we need shitty games with piss poor graphics is just plain wrong. What we need are high res games to enjoy 4K experiences.
I think this is a false dichotomy and an over-simplistic view of the game industry. Remember, there are far more indie games than AAA, so of course they’re going to earn less, there are more to choose from. Plus, if an indie game does too well, it often stops being indie. Most of the money for AAA games is from the same few people paying thousands of dollars in many small purchases too.
Anecdotally, most people’s favourite games are, or at least started off as indie games. However, most people’s least favourite are going to be indie as well. I think the thing with indie games is that they vary a lot, often exploring things that many publishers simply aren’t willing to. This allows them to find and fill a niche perfectly that a publisher can never fill. The main thing is that people see this and start making their own indie games, leading to market saturation pretty quickly.
Plus, the vast majority of people still don’t have 4K monitors. It may be the future, but you seem to think that’s where we are now when we just aren’t.
