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To add to this, indie games can be a nightmare if you don't have great hardware.
I had a low end graphics card in my PC for a few years because I rarely gamed. I looked at some indie games to see if I wanted to get back in to gaming with a low priced game first, so that it didn't matter too much if I didn't like it. There were loads of games that had late 90s style graphics, that looked like the platformers I used to play, but they needed quite high end specs to run, especially the graphics.
That put me off looking at indie games for quite a while. Something that looks worse than my SNES asking for at least a 1080 seemed wrong.
In the SNES days, everything had to be optimized. Nowadays, you don't need to optimize anything because most people have hardware that's overkill for that era of gaming. Even the engines are probably geared towards hardware that the "average" Steam user has.
That's a good point, and it's a shame that it's correct. There seems to be a load of games that could run on a SNES if they were optimised, but need a proper gaming PC instead.
Yea, some are definitely made by amateurs, but there are many that don't need crazy hardware, too.
The reason the big budget games look good is because full time artists and full time optimization of assets is a whole-ass job many indie teams won't have the budget for. Creating art is one thing. Making it render efficiently is a whole other ball game.
Game engines are getting better at helping small teams, though. Unreal Engine has quite a large suite of tools just for cleaning up and generating lower detail models and baking in vertex/parallax mapping, adding culling planes to maps so it doesn't render the whole thing at once, etc. It is a HUGE task to take good looking assets and also make them render quickly. Especially if they avoid something with tons of provided tools like UE. Then they have to do all that optimization in other ways or just skip it.