9 Ways 2017 Has Changed The Future Of Video Games Forever

4. Team Ninja Show How To Make An "Indie Game" That Contends With Triple-A Production

The "indie" label has gone from only being associated with side-scrolling platformers like Super meat Boy and Limbo, through to more impactful narratives a la Gone Home or Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, to now essentially being the new "B-tier" of game development.

Titles like Rocket League, Inside, Cuphead and more show that as more complex design software has been made available for free, the general bar of production quality has gone way up for a fraction of the price.

The latest and most impressive example is Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, Ninja Theory's introspective action-focused masterwork that explores psychosis by way of the titular character's descent into madness, accompanied by a Norse mythology backing. Ninja Theory stayed far away from consumer testing or designing anything with "mass appeal", and it shows: Hellblade is a monumental achievement, pairing a risky subject matter with gorgeous graphics and an action focus that paid off with solid half-million-in-three-months sales, justifying this model forevermore.

Whenever you read about triple-A developers stating that any more graphics-intensive games are "too expensive" and thus require microtransactions, look to Hellblade as proof that less is more.