On Feb 7, 2025, a small indie game called “A Game About Digging a Hole,” by DoubleBee. It’s a short game about buying a house, digging a hole in the backyard and reaching the bottom to reach treasure. You might think it may have seen a few downloads with not much success, and yet it was one of the most successful games to come out of 2025, easily going over a million downloads when many AAA games barely ever see success such as this. Which got me thinking of other cases such as this. In short, AAA game developers may have lost sight of what makes video games successful.
Many AAA games that are released in modern-day gaming seem to flop right out of the gate. Examples include “Concord,” “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League,” “Skull and Bones” and so on. Many games such as these are notable commercial failures and have seen massive monetary losses. At the same time, indie games such as “Hollow Knight: Silk Song,” “Schedule 1,” “R.E.P.O.” and “Balatro,” are incredibly successful and are marvelously outperforming many AAA releases.
Part of the reason why this may be is that indie games have a far smaller budget and don’t have the need for a major success to see returns, while Triple A studios, which pour piles of money into their projects, are banking on big returns, but this isn’t the entire picture either. Triple A studios tend to be led by big companies that are often leading projects for monetary gain alone, while many indie developers are often creating games purely for the love of the craft. This, of course, isn’t always the case as the opposite can be true as well sometimes, but indie developers are often gamers themselves and often know what goes into a good video game.
