Indie games often cater to whatever the devs found fun as kids, that kind of creates it's own kind of stagnation.

The indie boom of the late 00s and early 10s was to a certain degree the result of odd creatives working the Flashgame community (cut-throat in itself) being forced out onto other platforms as it died combined with other platforms providing monetization possibilities.

As with everything, once there was money to be found the vultures moved in.

I guess the question is what is "truly creative" for you? Does Half-Life Alyx count? How about the original Half-Life? Pong? Outer Wilds?

To me the likelyhood of a creative game coming from AAA studio is less likely than indie. Basically the same as movies. It can happen, but a truly creative game/movie/story is hard to come by in any sense. Was it the Ilyiad?

I think there is still roughly the same number of worthwhile games that get released each year, they are just buried by a ever increasing pile of shit.

There is shovelware at any level, but at the same time I think indie games have been a more consistent stream of good memorable entries than big budget studios the last 10 years.

I really have to rack my mind to find think of anything that I feel has been memorable the last decade, and even then half of them are AA titles (and many Japanese, dunno if it's the gambare ethos or what's up with that, maybe I'm a closet weeb). Nioh 2. KCD2. Expedition 33. Yakuza: Like A Dragon but not the sequel. The Elden Ring DLC. Prey 2017. Doom 2016 and Eternal. I guess Stalker 2 has been getting pretty good too.

For good indie games I can drop dozens of names without stopping to think. There's Hollow Knight and Silksong, Hedon, The Drifter, Lunacid, Cruelty Squad, Voin, Paradise Killer, Blue Prince, Fallen Aces, Not For Broadcast, Heaven's Vault, Chants of Sennaar, Dead Cells, Blasphemous, Immortality, Axiom Verge, The Blind Prophet, Cross Code, Cultist Simulator, Astalon, Dread Delusion, The Witness, The Signifier, ... I can keep going.

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