This so much!

I think it's probably a too many coocks problem, i don't see how it's possible to make a coherent experience if 600 people have their fingers somewhere in there.

Seriously it's still possible to make amazing games with a small team and budget. I mean look at Tearaway that was made by a coreteam of 15 people and is probably one of the best game to come out last year.

I think we're coming to the end of the current situation (where it's either AAA or Indie or bust).

I think with the extra horsepower provided by PS4/X1 whilst being more straight forward to develop, development costs to make an "okay" looking game are going to drop and we will start to see increasingly adventurous indie/smaller dev titles which fill the void which has been left by the collapse of the B publishers like THQ.

Games like Starlight Inception are certainly showing that "indie" doesn't have to be low resolution sprite based graphics and 80s gameplay.

The biggest problem with most of those AAA games is that they lack a base to support them. Everybody names GTA and CoD but the first iterations of those games were no AAA games. Instead they had a reasonable budget and made things ok, something that granted them a base to expand its budget to make bigger games and so on.

Yet now most of the failures come from games that are made with that AAA mentality without thinking if they will have a real market to substatin it, note that by real market I mean real consumers that will buy the game because it offers what they want, not the "fps crowd that will buy any game" mentality that some publishers have (or had, right THQ?).

Besides, most of the current videogames budget isn't involved with development but marketing. CoD spends way more in adverts that in making the game.

Perhaps western studios should learn a thing or two from the likes of CD Projekt Red and 4A Games. They seem to be fairly small yet make really good, engaging and technically ambitious games. Perhaps even more-so than most so called "AAA" games.