New Tech and Fresh Ideas: Behind the Rise of the Indie Developer

AAA studios are struggling. Meanwhile, successful indie developers focus on faster dev cycles, innovative game design, and new tech, which could represent a better way forward for major studios.

What’s Wrong With the Indie Darling to AAA Blockbuster Pipeline

Bigger gaming studios have always been risk averse; spending hundreds of millions of dollars to make a game doesn’t incentivise investment into unproven ideas. Activision spent over $1.5 billion on three Call of Duty games leading up to the 2020 release of Black Ops Cold War: Outspending the biggest Marvel movie of all time every few years encourages major studios to favor safe bets.

Indie games, on the other hand, have always been more experimental when it comes to genre, themes, and mechanics. When they succeed, they often set the direction for future AAA releases. Games like Guacamelee and Hollow Knight (among others), for example, resurrected the long-dead Metroidvania genre. Metroidvanias’ resurgence in popularity led to Ubisoft investing millions into a Prince of Persia Metroidvania last year to broadly positive acclaim.

However, taking a good idea from a successful indie game and building a AAA version isn’t the formula for success it used to be. Despite its positive critical reception, Ubisoft’s big budget Metroidvania, Prince of Persia: The LostCrown, racked up underwhelming initial sales. Despite revenue picking up in the wake of the game’s launch, the team that made it was disbanded after a single DLC release.

This begs the question: why? The Lost Crown is a well-received game. It sold 1.3 million copies and generated an enthusiastic response from critics and fans. It wasn’t a smash hit, but by no means a failure of the Indie-Darling-to-AAA-Blockbuster pipeline.

If You’re Not GTA V, You’re Nothing

The problem lies in the bigger economic picture. Last year, the bottom fell out of a games industry that was riding high on a lockdown-driven boom. In 2022, gaming pulled in an estimated $184 billion in revenue, more than the music industry and global box office put together. However, a combination of economic hard times, slumping sales as the pandemic waned, and ballooning development costs has made the gaming industry anything but recession-proof.

Today, one misstep can spell the end of a studio. Between 2023 and 2024, the gaming industry laid off around 25,000 people. Multiple developers shut down. Making a good game with respectable sales does not guarantee success. Or even a developer’s continued existence.

Put simply, the industry can’t keep moving forward with enormous budgets and multi-year dev cycles if those investments don’t guarantee spectacular returns. Unless you’re a smash hit, you’re a failure. For every GTA V, a AAA studio can end up spending hundreds of millions on a handful of failed titles. The model is not sustainable any longer.

Indie Game Development Offers a Blueprint for Larger Studios

Bigger studios should be taking more from indie developers’ successes than the genre of their next project. Rather than copying game concepts that are then developed using the AAA formula of a huge budget and long development cycle, major studios could perhaps look to indie developers’ processes instead.

Specifically: their focus on efficient design, faster dev cycles, and leveraging new tech to create memorable gaming experiences. Smaller studios are often limited by tight budgets and tighter development cycles. These challenges force many indie developers to emphasize efficiency when making a game.

Because indie developers tend to focus on smaller games as efficiently as possible, they can make them much faster than a traditional development cycle. The average Triple-A production cycle can run anywhere from two to five years or even more than 10 years (see GTA 6) but indie studios in 2025 are taking new titles to market in as little as 18 months.

Indie studios’ tendency to take big swings on new ideas also extends to technology, and often results in capturing large segments of emerging markets for relatively little investment.

For example, XR gaming is exploding in popularity, with worldwide XR headset shipments expected to hit 105 million units this year. There are definite parallels to be drawn with the mobile gaming revolution, where a bankrupt Finnish indie studio combined a simple concept with a mechanic perfectly suited to the new technology’s form factor, spawning a multi-billion dollar global gaming franchise: Angry Birds. Now, with the Meta Quest 3 and 3S driving strong adoption, the XR market is fertile ground for indie studios to grow new audiences as XR gamers look for more family-friendly, social gaming experiences. AAA developers should take note.

This combination of innovative approaches to new tech with faster dev cycles and smaller, more focused games could offer a path forward for bigger studios looking to break the mold. That, or the fate of the games industry may come to rest in the hands of its indie developers.

By: Bobby Voicu, CEO and Founder, MixRift