31 minutes ago, Promit said:
It's unclear to me which days were the "romantic" ones
I would define this as the time when small passionate teams (sometimes one man teams) accounted for gaming blockbusters. This was a time when noone thought you could ever make billions from video games, so noone thought a multimillion dev budget would be justifiable.
Think about a hit like Prince of Persia. It was a game with unbelievable production value for it's time. I'm not talking about innovation, just production value. And it was largely made by one entry level programmer. I think in those "romantic" times it was expected that a small passionate indie team *could* publish a polished hit and compete with the big guys.
It was probably the same earlier on (in the Atari period), but I started gaming the 80s. So I am not sure.
Today I don't think any indie thinks they can compete with the production value of a AAA title today. Sure, you can strike gold with innovation ( ex: minecraft ) but there will be no indie "Call of Duty". If you compare blockbuster indie developers Crytek to ID software, you will see that Crytek needed a much bigger team to make a blockbuster then ID did. Whereas ID where just "a couple of kids", the very talented Yerli brothers needed an established team around them (and a AAA publisher) to break out.