100% agreed. The golden age of gaming is right now, Kickstarter and Steam have opened up the field to smaller studios in a way that has never happened before.
The biggest, most advertised titles are often very good-looking and very "bubblegum", for the exact same reason that the most popular genres of pop are like they are. To appeal to the widest audience, you have to file off all the sharp corners, and if that's the market you see then modern games can seem soulless.
But that's not all of the market! No matter what genre you are interested in, there's probably more work ongoing in it and better games coming out right now that there ever has been in history. Most of them are less refined and sell a lot less than the mainstream games, but occasionally one succeeds well enough to expand past the small niche audience, which inevitably brings a lot more people into the niche, followed by imitators which grow the niche.
I feel like the indie-games are almost as clustered in small areas of potential "game design space" as AAA-games are, but just clustered in different areas, in particular around "games inspired by ha handful of SNES games and early Playstation JRPGs" (and maybe a tiny amount of vague Rogue-like-likeness). If you read much about old games (e.g. [1]) it is obvious that the history of games is full of evolutionary dead-ends and forgotten mainstream games (and entire almost-forgotten mainstream genres).
Yeah, it's hard not to consider the runaway success of games like Stardew Valley as counterexamples to the idea that the creativity is completely gone. But you wouldn't blame someone if they superficially looked at screentshots and thought it was a run of the mill retro pixel game. But it's wild to me that there are people who come from broken homes or rough childhoods who say the game was literally therapy for them and showed them a vision of domestic life or human interaction that they could realistically replicate or at least shoot for in real life.
I'm currently playing a game that is a blatent rip-off of Stardew Valley to the point where I frequently question why they were so obvious. (Or maybe those elements are rip-offs of Harvest Moon, I haven't played Harvest Moon to know.) Still, it's enjoyable. The design elements and places where it does diverge from Stardew Valley make it more enjoyable in my opinion.
As the saying goes, "good artists borrow, great artists steal."
Harvest Moon defines the "Turning round a dilapidated farm in a small village where you give everyone gifts all the time" genre. It all comes from there.
EDIT: Stardew Valley has so many QoL improvements over harvest moon though. The early HM games are punishing.
> I feel like the indie-games are almost as clustered in small areas of potential "game design space" as AAA-games are, but just clustered in different areas, in particular around "games inspired by ha handful of SNES games and early Playstation JRPGs
Huh? That is also an artifact of what kind of games you follow. Just of the top of my head:
- colony sims
- strategy games (tactical/operational/grand-, with rt, rt+pause, turnbased options for each)
- racing games
- 4x games
- flight sims
- spaceflight sims
- rpgs
- survival games
- shmups/ bullet hell
- roguelike/roguelite
- exploration
- rhytm games
- horror
- factory builder / management sim
The biggest, most advertised titles are often very good-looking and very "bubblegum", for the exact same reason that the most popular genres of pop are like they are. To appeal to the widest audience, you have to file off all the sharp corners, and if that's the market you see then modern games can seem soulless.
But that's not all of the market! No matter what genre you are interested in, there's probably more work ongoing in it and better games coming out right now that there ever has been in history. Most of them are less refined and sell a lot less than the mainstream games, but occasionally one succeeds well enough to expand past the small niche audience, which inevitably brings a lot more people into the niche, followed by imitators which grow the niche.