WorriedSandwich said:
You don't need a ton of money to come up with ideas.
You need marginally more to make coded content (ie. story, gameplay), and you need ONE decent artist to make an excellent artstyle.
The only things that cost ubermoney is realistic graphics and marketing.
That's why AAA games are invariably heavily marketed with excellent graphics.
Let's look at a game like, say, Mirror's Edge. It had a pretty standard story, but nifty gameplay, different artstyle, beautiful graphics and stylish presentation. Guess which of those cost BY FAR the most money?
Do you really think that "moar money" would have more than marginally improved the gameplay of, say, Borderlands? No. That's silly. Sure, they could add more options, but in the end, the whole point of Borderlands is "shoot the things, collect the items" and all the "options" are just dressing. It wouldn't have massively improved the story, either, because the game wasn't about the story, and they needed to seat the game with its audience before really digging into the lore. Also, an artstyle is only as good as its graphics. Imagine Okami with massive clipping issues, disappearing textures, and giant pixels.
For a perfect example, check out Dwarf Fortress. It is supported entirely by donations, and has the best damned gameplay, scope, concept and execution I've seen in a long while. The graphics are non-existent. No amount of money would improve any of it beyond the lack of graphics.
(OK, "no graphics" isn't fair. They make crayon drawings and send them to donors, so I guess that counts.)
The point is, games cost tens of millions of dollars to make nowadays, entirely because of graphics/marketing. To say "We should have games with that size of budget but without good graphics) is really, really wasteful. If anything, you're only going to ludicrously up the marketing budget. In that $40,000,000 game, there's no way they spent more than $6-$7,000,000 on actual game-related stuff, all of which an indie can do just as well for a tenth of the price.
