After lot of AA devs/publishers collapsed, and after indie revolution happened, next logical step was emergence of III or Triple-I games, that might be defined as indie games that have relatively high budget, scope, and ambition. Some examples would be ARK, Hellblade, Subnautica and probably most successful of all, PUBG (with over 50 million copies sold).

What are your favorite Triple-I games?

PUBG is not an indie. Bluehole made Tera back in 2011.

Ark is trash. Buggy trash.

Hellblade and Subnautica are really damned good though.

Intensity. Integrity. Intelligence.

I can't really think of any off the top of my head. I'll just go with Hellblade, too.

Anything from Stardock, be it Sins of a solar Empire, Galactic Civilizations, Elemental or Ashes of Singularity.

Some quick trivia:

1. These guys have been around since 1991 and started as a game developer for OS/2, a competitor to the early windows versions (Win 3.x to Windows 2000) and made some programs on the side as the games alone didn't bring enough money, especially in between releases.
2. Galactic Civilizations II: The dark avatar is the highest-ranking expansion pack on GameRankings, standing at a whooping 92.61%. Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of Arnor isn't far behind with 92.33%.
3. Ever used Gamestop Impulse, Gamestops online game store? It started out as Stardock Impulse until Gamestop bought that one (Stardock was under heavy financial pressure due to Elemental: War on Magic failing hard) and retooled it. Was my go-to online store until that point btw, where I switched to GOG as my main store.

Until a short time ago, I would have said Obsidian or InXile Studios, but Microsoft bought them, so they're not independent anymore...

I got ARK last year for for my younger son, he thoroughly enjoyed it, I've tried it a bit, but it's not my cup of tea. I refunded Hellblade after hour and half, didn't like anything about it except for combat (mostly cause of feints), I have Subnautica (again for younger son, he's into survival games), I heard it's a great game, but again, I doubt it's my cup of tea since I find survival/crafting outside of RPGs tedious and boring.

As for PUBG, I guess that's interesting case - I'd say it started as Triple-I, and then when Bluhole bought them it became AA...which frankly is what Triple-I games mostly are, since they fill that slot.

I was surprised I fairly liked Plague Tale: Innocence, I got it mostly for setting, but was cautious about it, since I don't like that type of games (TloU was snorefest for me), but in the end it kept me quite entertained and interested all the way through.

Now, not sure would that be considered Triple-I or AA, since they have publisher, I guess the lines get blury in lot of cases. For instance, Star Citizen is closing to $300 millions, that is AAAA budget, but they are "indie".

My Urge to chant "you suck" at this comment is pretty high, not gonna lie.

In terms of actual really awesome now growing indie devs I would say that the people behind Stardew valley are awesome, they've been building that game for the last 2-3 years and it's consistantly in the top 10 charts on Switch at least because of this work.

Everything Digital devolver does is pretty awesome too, I would kinda think of them as being an indie dev/publisher if that makes sense.

How did I forget Plague Tale? I'm playing it right now! Guess I didn't know it was an indie game. It didn't have an indie price!

Gonna have to go with Warframe for this one.

Well, technically it's probably not, it's published by Focus Home Interactive, so AA game. But that's the thing, is game published by Devolver Digital an indie? Or it needs to be self-published to retain that status? Cause technically, Fortnite is indie.

To be honest, I much prefer old A/AA/AAA nomenclature, Triple-I is not something new, but I guess it got lot more used since Hellblade, which is also really just an AA game, if we're not looking at if it's selfpublished or not.

Would Wreckfest qualify. Think bugbear or whatever delevoped it and THQ Nordic published it