As the end of the year quickly approaches, gamers will soon have the chance to recognize the best games of the year via The Game Awards. This year, 2025, was different though. Despite many notable games from AAA studios and publishers, many of the games likely to win are indie games, unlike in years past. The indie games scene has been steadily becoming mainstream for several years now, but 2025 has really broken the barrier where many gamers would rather take a chance on playing an indie game rather than a AAA title. This shift in player sentiment is causing massive shake ups at the highest levels of the gaming industry. Publishers with billions of dollars backing them are closing studios and eliminating hundreds of thousands of jobs, while smaller game developers are emboldened to create their passion project games. This post will discuss how this happened, and which indie games of 2025 have helped set this in motion.
How This Happened
The gaming industry has been becoming increasingly more stale and bland up until this point. For the most part, billion dollar publishers and studios have dominated the games market. From basically colluding for a $70 new game price point to releasing the same game year after years with no innovation, these AAA companies have put their need for money and profits before the player experience for too long. Players have had enough and 2025 is the year of reconning.
Indie games and smaller studios have done the exact opposite of their AAA counterparts, and it has led to massive success. They have innovated within established genres, making new experiences that are fun and engaging. Indie game price points are all set below the $70 AAA games, some going as low as just $10. This combination of putting the player before the profits and creating innovative games has set many indie games up for success in 2025. That being said, this formula for success only works if the game is genuinely fun and priced correctly – indie games that get this wrong will have much tougher time finding success. These differences are so stark that AAA have lost nearly all the trust of gamers that they built up for the past few decades.
Indie Games of 2025 that helped set this in motion
There is one hero of a game that is really spearheaded this shift in player sentiment. This is not to say that the other indie games of 2025 are bad, but this games goes above and beyond what any ever thought possible from an indie game. In fact, it’s better than 99% of all AAA games ever released. This game is Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Expedition 33 looks like thousands of people worked on; it sounds like hundreds of people composed it; and most importantly, it plays like the best developers in the world poured their hearts and souls into it. In reality less than 50 people created this masterpiece. Only through Expedition 33 have these developers established themselves as the best in the world.
This begs the question – if less than 50 people can create Expedition 33, shouldn’t AAA publishers and studios that have thousands of staff, hundreds of composers, and the “best” developers in the world be able to create something that rivals Expedition 33? The answer so far is a resounding NO. This is why there is no trust in the AAA gaming industry tycoons anymore. They have all the resources but cannot produce the quality games that small studios with infinitely less resources can.
Of course, Expedition 33 is not the only indie game that heavily outperformed AAA games in 2025. Schedule 1, Megabonk, and Ball x Pit all sold hundreds of thousands of copies of their game and outperformed AAA games on nearly every single metric. Funny thing is, these games were developed by one or two developers each.
Here’s more: Hollow Knight: Silksong and Hades 2 are both sequels to indie games that had massive success in past years. Both games sold also sold hundreds of thousands of copies and heavily outperformed AAA titles that were released this year.
Moving onto multiplayer centric games, a space that AAA has always dominated – the dominion is beginning to crumble. ARC Raiders and Escape from Duckov both have more players than most AAA ever get, even weeks after their release. Concurrent players for these games number in the hundreds of thousands.
There are many other indie games that are not mentioned above but have still had wild success in 2025. This trend is a lesson to gamers and game developers alike – price does not equal quality. There is a massive change happening right now in the gaming industry, and if gamers “play” it right, they will win with lower priced yet higher quality games.
