About half of every triple A game is actually indie by the strict definition. Look at world of Warcraft for example. But the strict definition it’s indie

Self published is a bad metric to go by and means basically nothing. There’s a good reason the term has lost basically all meaningful definition and is just a vibes based measuring stick nowadays.

Basically every ue5 game will happily devour upwards of 16-21 gigs of ram if you have it. And if you don’t will just slam the fuck out of your hard drive like there’s no tomorrow.

It’s really easy to think games need less ram then they actually do when you don’t have enough to go around and shits just swaps more killing performance. But the ram number is lower!

Yes, many apps will use a lot of RAM if it’s available, that’s how RAM is supposed to be used. If you have 16GB and a game is actually causing swapping I’d be surprised. An app that can use 20GB isn’t necessarily going to consume all the RAM on a system with under 20GB. Higher memory pressure statistics will mean more aggressive evictions but not necessarily swapping.

I have 64GB so the “you don’t have enough to go around” bit doesn’t apply to me.

There’s plenty of games that you could say the same about that didn’t get the traction. It’s still a hit based industry. It’s not a knock against the game, it’s a reality of the industry.

They were always going to receive at least some critical acclaim. This is a AA game from a well-known and respected publisher (Kepler Interactive), so it couldn’t have gone entirely under the radar. They had a decent enough marketing budget and initially were included in the Microsoft Gamepass specifically to secure the studio’s financial future in an uncertain market. The game was objectively good so with all that help, by release day there was no way that the game was going to be a complete dud à la Concord, and I recall Broche saying in interviews that profitability was essentially expected even though the stratospheric success was not.

Also they did get “unlucky” because the Oblivion remaster not-so-coincidentally shadow-dropped a couple days before E33’s release. It’s not much of a stretch to say that Microsoft knew the game was good and (mostly unsuccessfully) tried to drown it out.

If E33 was going to truly flop, it would have been earlier in the development process IMO. They could have relinquished voting shares to investors and been forced to “ubisoftify” the game into bland nothingness. Key creatives could have left. Going all-in on UE5 might have been a technical quagmire. But when the game went Gold, there was very little that could have impeded an at least modest amount of success.

Where the industry is truly unforgiving is single A games. There’s too much to keep track and it’s entirely possible for the “media” (journalists, youtubers, streamers, etc.) to miss a very good game. Single A doesn’t pack enough of a punch to force enough eyeballs on trailers to get a critical mass of fan following, and in that context I fully agree that even a perfect game can still be a complete flop.

I think RDR2 was so memorable because the Western genre is so underrepresented these days. Sure it was such a popular genre with ton of movies and books for a while decades ago before video games were really a thing, but what was the most recent Western movie or TV show any of us have seen? I think the newest one I’ve seen was 1999’s Wild Wild West. Maybe 2004’s Home on the Range if that counts?

If we were getting 3 AAA titles released each year that fall in the Wild West genre RDR2 would just fade into the noise. Its a brilliant game but the only thing it notably did differently from any other open world RPG was unabashedly be a Wild West game that hit every possible trope of the genre including the silly ones like dueling quick draws

I work in embedded my whole life so I’m no stranger of fighting over scraps of resources and spending days trying to squeeze in something that doesn’t fit. It made me better at fighting this specific hardware limitations, and now instead of spending 10 times more time on making something that takes no time at all on a capable hardware, I spend only 5 times more.
I don’t know if for creative work it does something, but for programming it’s like chopping wood with one hand behind your back. Sure you can do it, sure you can get better at it, sure it forces you to adjust your ways, but it doesn’t make the wood better chopped, it just makes you slower and more prone to mistakes for no reason

I disagree, it’s not just the setting. I’ve played about 50 hours of it in the last couple weeks and like 250 total, and the entire time I’ve felt its level of polish and detail is unmatched in any game.

“The games that people are excited about are almost like semi-indie studios,” Chmielarz says, taking the example of The Witcher and Cyberpunk developer CD Projekt Red, which he acknowledges "has shareholders, but behaves and acts as if [it is] independent.

I am screaming internally.

We’ve redefined AAA to mean “games that are in crisis” and then keep shouting “AAA is in crisis” like it’s a shocking revelation.

Honey dear, if CDPR and Cyberpunk are goddamn indie games I don’t know what AAA is. Everybody is running around calling these massive games with nine digit budgets “indie” and pretending that they’re the exception in a “AAA” industry apparently entirely made up of Call of Duty.

At this point this conversation means exactly nothing. I am so exhausted of it.

As opposed to what?

Because the “interesting story” games also did all that work. Thankfully. Good visuals and good stories are both… you know, good art.

Apparently we’ve gone all the way around, because there has been no numbered Baldur’s Gate game that wasn’t AAA as absolute fuck.

This sentence makes my brain hurt. They co-opted it how? You’re just entirely unwilling to engage with any piece of media the far right actually likes just on principle? As in, regardless of how… not far right the piece of media itself happens to be?

I hate this century. This century sucks.

“A couple exceptions”? Over “the past few years”?

What rock have you been living under? I barely kept up with great 2025 games as it is.

“Almost like” and “behaving like an independent studio” is vastly different from being one.

Well, yes it is.

That is exactly how being things and not being things are.

If you go with “well, it’s not an indie, but it behaves like one in my view” as selection criteria, then the remainder of “AAA” you are left with by that tautological selection process is by definition made up of whatever bad habits you’ve arbitrarily determined to be “bad AAA behavior”.

I’m very happy that the guy jives with CDPR. Good for him. But what he’s found is a AAA studio that works in ways he likes, not a “semi-indie” studio that just happens to own a first party platform (until last week, anyway), make massive games and be publicly owned.

If you define AAA as “studios that do bad things I don’t like” you can’t expect to be taken seriously when you complain about how all AAA studios are doing things you don’t like.

The series was very good, but it was still a low budget project. BG1 was developed for an estimated $1.5-3M. BG2 was developed for $7M. I can’t even find budgets for Icewind Dale or Planescape: Torment.

But compare that the BG3’s $100M budget (closer to $200M after marketing).

These were great games, but they were largely indie games. None of them had AAA budgets back in the 90s. Even at the scale of the era, Ultima XI cost $12M to produce. The OG FF7 cost $45M.

By that metric there were maybe two AAA PC games in all of 1998. BG1 you can make the case (but given that it was an Interplay-published, licensed game meant for relatively performant hardware, it was absolutely in line with AAA PC releases of the day). BG2? Absolutely not. Bordering on eight digits in 2000 was not a small game at all. And of course neither were independent games by definition.

For sure BG3 is absurdly large and the historical comparisons break down a bit in the sheer scale of what that thing is. But nobody in the late 90s was buying a top down D&D CRPG with the production values of BG (or an action RPG in the vein of Diablo the previous year) and thinking they were slumming it in the dregs of small budget gaming.

By that metric there were maybe two AAA PC games in all of 1998.

There were a lot fewer, certainly. FF7 was the heavyweight. Zelda: Ocarina, MGS, and StarCraft were in the running. Shenmu (produced a year later) had a budget north of $47M (the high fluctuation in Yen value making this a hard calculation).

But you wouldn’t see truly big budget gaming until GTA4 crested the nine digit mark.

Bordering on eight digits in 2000 was not a small game at all.

The difference between $7M and $47M is a buncha lotta money.

MGS only made it to Windows in 2000. OoT obviously never did, officially.

Where I was, the games running in demo PCs and net cafés in 98/99 were Quake 3, Unreal and, believe it or not, yeah, Baldur’s Gate. Because BG1 already had pretty much the same MP as BG3 and people would pay per seat to play co-op runs of the original.

For the PC crowd BG1 and Starcraft were on a pretty even playing field in terms of scope perception.

The thing is, at the time counting budgets wasn’t much of a consideration. For one thing, most of them weren’t publicly known at all, beyond the extreme outliers you mention. People took notice when 50 mill were broken because that was such a high water mark for so long, but if AAA was a concept at all (it wasn’t), it certainly had more to do with branding and promotional materials. Having ads on good old normie broadcast TV did more to sell the size of FF7 than how big it was.

Ultimately BG was a major release. It came from a familiar publisher, it had a recognizable license, it had the same gaming magazine coverage as other major releases of the year, and it got a ton of critical praise and buzz across the industry. It didn’t come across as scope-constrained at all. FF7 was on another level entirely, but that was true of pretty much every other game release.

Also, FWIW, OoT wasn’t that big of a deal where I am, and neither was the N64 in general. GoldenEye and Turok drove more attention than OoT, and neither of those were particularly relevant, either. You would have definitely had much more luck getting people to recognize Baldur’s Gate than OoT over here in 1999.