A very well reasoned take that I entirely agree with.

I mean yeah, as a stereotypical semi-insane/delusional solo dev myself... can indie devs make awesome shit?

Absolutely yes.

Can they make something on the scale of production value / plain ole scope of a well paid AA or AAA team?

Fuck no, not unless you count 'they took 10 actual years to do it all, basically by themselves', or, basically sold out somewhere before year 10 to get an actual team and resources, for way way waaay above a reasonable price.

But yeah, its basically a tragedy, but a seemingly capitalist realist unavoidable tragedy, at least untill somebody sets up the equivalent of Mondragon as a game dev studio/publisher.

To me, the absolute worst thing is that basically every AA team just does eventually get gobbled up and shit out by a megacorp.

There are very few counterexamples to this, on like a decade timescale... they tend to be the ones that are firecely independent and dedicated to basically one game, that they just keep updating... everybody else that does a seemingly pointless sequel?

Basically, they do that because they could not afford not to, they spent or otherwise lost too much money.

And then even like Unity gets enshittified.

Its a fucking mess, we've got MBA brained sharks making all the decisions, and basically, they're evil idiots who care about nothing other than line go up.

Aren't they notoriously famous for laying off most of those massive dev teams after each release?

Seems to me most won't get much stability in one of those companies. Also not much time for family when they also famously have to crunch 12+ hour days when release is closing in.

But if the current giants die, new giants will arise from the existing smaller studios, no? There will always be a need for the next FIFA, F1, COD, whatever type of game, and someone will step in to fill that need if EA and the rest die, I imagine.