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Apologies if this thread has a clickbaity title, but the inspiration for this question comes from this video:

Basically, what the video says that Indie Games have become superior to AAA Games cause they focus on fun… by talking about the Halo Franchise for about 75% of the video (probably just used as a case study). Now, I don't think the statement that "Indie Games are better than AAA because they're more fun" is exactly a profound one, at least not these days, so I'm interested in hearing it from you guys. Do you think that Indie devs will eventually replace the current big names in the industry? Can AAA games still be fun?

I think AAA games can still be fun, and the big companies can still release great games (Elden Ring comes to mind for this year), but it is clear that overall, the quality of AAA games and the AAA game companies have dropped precipitately over the years, but commenters have noted that Indie devs can and do fall into similar traps, so I suppose the more decentralized nature of indie dev can limit the damage. And I'm personally not gonna say that AAA is dead until another gaming crash happens (which will likely because it's a general recession…)

I want to say not really.

For every major success like Hades or Hollow knight, you have a tsunami wave of indie games that either failed, didn't sell very well, weren't very good/bad, too obscure or some combination of all the above. It's extremely difficult for most indie dev's to keep their head above the water, let alone for their games to stand out amongst the waves. They can not easily shrug off failures like the AAA giants do and try all over again.

Furthermore, as the video stated, the AAA Industry has changed drastically over the decades. The AAA of today does not all represent the AAA of before when gaming was more a niche & passionate hobby. Videogames are now an extremely lucrative market, a big business more so than the film & music industry combined. A crash is overdue, but I don't believe there is way to go back to the "good o'l days" considering how mainstream gaming has become. At best, we will see them drop of what I like to call the "scattergun" approach too success. I.E. make a bunch of live-serivce crap in the hopes that 1 or 2 make it big and compensates for the failures and then some. This is incredibly unsustainable strategy that needs to go away asap.

I think it can be compared to what happened to other entertainment media like music or movies.

Video Games have matured to big business. Even with a "small" game on kickstarter you easily get into a budget of over a 100k, imagine how big a large-scale game like Halo must cost. When there gets so much money involved, the risks also become pretty big. So the biggest companies try to play it as safe as possible. Which results often in bland products.

Indie companies are much smaller by comparison, they don't need to go past a dozen supervisors and board commitees to get approval. Which results in more creative titles.

But this is a pretty black-white explanation, i have to add that there are big studios who have teams dedicated to smaller creative projects while on the other hand there are Indie devs who only try to copy the latest trends.

I don't think there will be a crash coming because if titles like battlefield or cyberpunk 77 didn't ruin the industry, you'll have to come with something apocalyptical to end the industry.

TLDR: The same thing that happened to hollywood happened to video games.

SHORT ANSWER: No
LONG ANSWER: No not really but theres no reason not to enjoy AAA games and Indie games that arent trash anyway.

To me personally I go with it being better to judge a game on its own merits over whether it was Indie or not since both produce a ton of trash that try to bury the gems. Its just trash in the indie sphere tends to fall into irrelevancy ibstabtly while AAA trash tends to a have a marketing arm behind it that makes ignoring or forgetting it harder. As such for me persobally No, indies arent killing AAA.

(Hell if anything AAA games do a better job killing themselves than indies ever could)

The video also says that indie games benefit from a singular vision.
Triple A tend to be so sanitized and play tested that it's filled with "standard good gameplay" and every interesting idea is watered down until it doesn't matter.

But it can still be found in triple A games, when the whole dev team is following a crazy person (suda 51, kojima, yoko taro).

If anyone will end up killing the AAA igaming ndustry it will be the AAA gaming industry itself and its ridiculous price inflations.

I have a bad feeling Indie Companies will start acting like AAA Companies in some way.

TBH AAA don't need any help to pepsi themselves, they do it with shitty decisions