What are some good indies from the past few years? Most of my most placed indie games are over a decade old by now.

I think this is the big issue of the next few years. Large AAA studios have budgets so high that they are completely risk adverse. The low end of the indie scene is flooded with vibe coded Unity junk. And the gooey middle goodness with the awesome stuff is being squeezed by those two.

I suspect we will correct back to some form of sanity but it is a few years away and the interim period will be rough.

Those at the top need to start looking smaller scale. If I was at Microsoft, Halo/COD can have its big budgets, whatever. But also loosen the chains on smaller teams to try new things. Games that have similar budget and finish turn around times of the Ps2/Xbox/GC era only now you have modern engine tech at your hands.

Budgets decent enough to have the chance to do it well but not so big that it comes up in the next share holders call as the reason for 500 laid off.

Sony used to do this in the Ps1 era, games would be given a change on the market and even if it wasn't a huge hit, they would give them another chance. Silly ideas like Katamari Damacy came out of this thinking at Namco and that paid of big time.

There has always been a element of this in places but it has grown significantly in the last few decades.

Funnily enough my example is the film Grease. The dialog is astoundingly plain but presented well enough. Maybe this is why it is seen as a mainstream classic because of this simple language.

But then I see the works of some like Charlie Kaufman that was just wonderful but has rarely broken into the main stream.

I second this watched the first probably 90min and turned it off, I was bored out of my mind. Idk what people saw in it, the writing acting cinematography were all shit.

Netflix apparently has a rule that movies they produce must explicitly state the goal out loud three times. Because they expect viewers to only half pay attention while browsing on their phones.

But yeah, the dumbed-down-ness really sucks. I only got 3 episodes into the Avatar live action TV show, and a big part of it was the quality of writing. It constantly felt like they were just telling me stuff instead of just letting the story happen. When the opening episode did a variation of the cartoon's famous opening monologue three times I knew we were in trouble. And it just got worse from there.

There never was anything original. All of culture, invention, science, and art is iterative and would not exist without copying in the first place.