The point with the indie haters is that they spent 250-300-350$ so they are not willing to occupy themselves with low budget games and I can see where they are coming from, I mean you get new console and you expect bleeding edge games. This is the problem Vita owners had, by spending 250$ for a fantastic console, only to play a few good looking games and the rest of the lineup is...indies. After a while you begin to resent their existence because they attract attention and you struggle to find the games that you bought the console for. This is not a rational response sure, this is mostly psychological.

Yet the DS came out bundled with the best looking DS game to date (hunters)! The games that were runaway hits though were far from pushing the DS to its limit however. Besides, big budget (I refuse to call them AAA) games take few risks (COD) because a big budget bomb can kill an entire company (200 eurocom employees - one bad 007 legends game - they were done!).

The biggest annoyance though is that while it was ok when those games cost 10-15$, going beyond that people start to moan. We got swords and soldiers II 20 which got a lot of heat (having paid 1Eu for the first game, there was no way I would spend close that amount) and then no man's sky was a full priced game and while people did not realize, the price was one of the MAIN reasons it got flamed. The game should have sold for 20-25$ max. Yooka Laylee was a game people expected it to be on the 20$ price range and got flamed because it cost double that and did not offer "the current age content people expected" which is abstract in itself yes but I can kinda see the whole logic. Digital only games are smaller and cheaper, big budget games are better looking and hopefully bigger (the order got flamed as well - small single player no multiplayer). Yes there is the issue of playtime and games like unepic offer around 20H - far more than many big budget games, yet no one would be willing to spend 30$ for that game as there is a correlation between price and expensive "cutting edge" assets. If the keep had 2.5D graphics with dynamic lighting and all these nifty effects, it could go up to 20$ or even a bit more, which seems to be the upper limit for 2D games. Yes price is GOD, even if we do not consciously understand.

what people fail to see is that we are moving away from the indie-big budget differentiation with games costing how much the developer wants (I really can NOT stress how important the price is, it can sometimes be even more important than the product itself - this is standard marketing) with big budget games, smaller budget games with middleware and outsourced asset building (betting on these models in the future!) small and smaller budget (some of which will be on mobile platforms) and while some indies made it on disks, the trend goes into the other direction with more and more niche "disk" games being digital only in western markets etc and the fact that the HALO5 collector's edition has no disk inside, should make people think!

the big budget haters...they can stick to their low budget PCs and enjoy steam until the end of time. Besides, many big budget games drop in price and there have been quite a few games I would not have enjoyed at 60$ while people are willing to forgive their flaws at 20$ for instance. Reviews are made at the original price though!

oh and pixel art is being overused to death. Many ho hum games use pixel art to attract sales and some are even ugly (lone survivor I am looking at you)...nostalgia has its limits mind you.