Top 10 Advantages the Indie Game Industry Has Over the AAA Game Industry

It's refreshing to see so many different concepts and ideas for indie games instead of the same old World War II shooters from Activision over and over again.

Large game companies like Activision and EA force their developers to make Call of Duty and FIFA games without changes. Indie game developers are not controlled by large gaming corporations, allowing them to produce unique contributions to the gaming industry.

Indie developers put all their time and effort into making their games the best they can be, rather than rushing them to make a quick buck. This is why indie game companies are not prime targets for acquisitions.

This is beneficial if your PC or game console has most of its disk space taken up by other games.

This piece of trivial information makes all the difference because indie games run very well on low-end computers and don't require much RAM. Whenever I play graphically demanding games on my Steam Deck, like FFVII Remake, I can hear the cooling fans at full volume, trying to cool down the CPU, which could be a possible fire hazard.

However, when I play something like Super Meat Boy on the Deck, you can barely hear any cooling fan noise because the game doesn't require much CPU power to play.

All the more reason why the Steam Deck is my indie console of choice. Not to mention that most indie games on Steam are verified at best and playable at worst. For added perspective, Windows XP (an operating system from 2001) is the minimum OS requirement for Forager, a game that came out in 2019.

Indie games usually sell for around $20 and often much less when they're on sale. I bought Super Meat Boy from Steam and the Xbox Live Marketplace when it was on sale for $1.49.

Without direction from AAA game corporations, indie developers can create games in any genre they choose, even older ones like Metroidvania games (Axiom Verge, Hollow Knight, Blasphemous), dungeon crawlers (Hades, The Binding of Isaac, Hammerwatch), and 3D collectathon platformers (Yooka-Laylee, A Hat in Time, New Super Lucky's Tale). The list goes on.

I dare you to play a music track from Cyberpunk 2077 on the piano. Can't think of anything? Now I dare you to play a music track from Undertale on the piano. You immediately start playing Megalovania on the piano.

Not just Undertale, but games like A Hat in Time, Hades, Pizza Tower, Celeste, and Terraria have some of the best soundtracks and sound design you'll ever hear in a video game.

Hollow Knight was made by just two people at their own pace, while FIFA games are created by dozens of employees who have to deal with crunch time. Think about that for a minute.

Do you remember when Fallout 76 launched and was riddled with bugs, glitches, and crashes? Celeste came out the same year and was playable at launch. This really shows how big-budget gaming giants have taken a step backward in game development compared to indie developers.