I was thinking about Low Budget titles, and I came to the conclusion that a developer has more freedom to work with when it invests in a low budget title.
For example, if you were going to invest 100 million dollars into a movie, you'd want to make sure it would be successful, so you would not want to put it into anything potentially risky. What's successful? As an investor, you would look at movies that worked before and you would emulate it. Perhaps you would dump all that money into a movie like Spiderman 3, sinces its pretty much a surefire hit.
I think the same applies to games. Budgets get to high nowadays that developers and publishers want to make sure they get a return on their investment, so they will not deviate from what has worked previously (i.e. Mario Party 8, Tekken 10, or whatever).
The low budget title would be the equivalent of the independant movie. A developer hasn't invested too much money into it, so it doesn't have to worry about losing as much money. With out the huge risk, the developer can make a super-nontraditional game, throw it out into the market and see if it sticks (a non-traditional game like Warioware for example).
Most of these games probably won't sell too well, but probably enough to cover some of the losses. But if you have a high enough volume of quirky low-budget titles, there is bound to be a gem out there that will catch on and will become super popular. A "Napoleon Dynamite" of videogames, as it were.
The Big companies will catch on, copy the concepts of that popular low budget title, and then the mainstream will be able to experience it too. This is usually the case with Hollywood, and I surmise that this will also be the case with videogames.
