You may think that small self-funded Indie games would be completely stomped on by the big budget high quality game companies, right?
Indie games are small games usually made by a few people, but Triple A games are games made by giant companies with hundreds, if not thousands, of employees and coders.
Some examples of Indie games are: Hollow Knight, Hollow Knight: Silksong, Schedule 1, Bloodmoney, Balatro, The Binding of Issac, Cuphead, Stardew Valley, etc. An example of a AAA (Triple A) Game would be: Cyberpunk: 2077, GTA 5, Red Dead Redemption 2, Fallout 4, Call Of Duty Black Ops Six, Doom Eternal, The Legend of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom Etc.
In recent years, Indie games have been rising in popularity, and it seems as if Indie games are rising over games made by big companies. An example of this would be Schedule 1 and Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. Schedule 1 is a game made by one man named Tyler and is about making and selling illegal substances in a small town named Hyland Point.
Assassins Creed Shadows is another installment to the Assassins Creed series made by Ubisoft. Set in 16th-century Japan towards the end of the Sengoku period, the game focuses on the millennia-old struggle between the Assassin Brotherhood, who fight for peace and liberty, and the Templar Order, who desire peace through control.
Schedule 1 would come out only four days after Assassins Creed Shadows. You would think a giant series of games like Assassins Creed would completely over-shadow a small one man game like Schedule 1 right? Wrong. Sources say that Schedule 1 released almost 8 million copies in its first month, but Assassins Creed Shadows would only sell 2.5 million copies in its first month.
There are many more examples of games like Schedule 1 being more popular than games like Assassins Creed, but these are good examples of cheap self made Indie games rising over expensive, microtransaction filled, Triple A games.