As more and more money gets poured into AAA game titles, there are a few missing elements that indie games can bring back to gaming.

The problem with any medium of entertainment that breaks into mainstream popularity is that over time, quality becomes compromised to offer a more widely accessible product. The stage, for instance, which was once a place for the output of poetic brilliance by anyone from Shakespeare to David Mamet, is now largely capitalized by musical renditions of Legally Blonde and Spiderman. The same is true of games - as corporations attempt to hit the biggest demographic with every entry, a lot of core artistic aspects are being lost.

This is where you come in - whether you’re enrolled in courses or schools that teach video game design online, or are just starting out as an indie developer, you have the control to bring back some missing components of the craft:

1. Level of Difficulty
In order to branch out to new gamers, many games have plateaued their level of difficulty to the point that your little sister could beat the game just as quickly as you can. And why not? They want to sell games to your little sister too. But working in a small development environment, where the careers of you and your team aren’t hanging off of the money of a large corporation, you can make a game targeted at someone who wants to spend hours perfecting their skills. VVVVVV, for instance, offers an unreal level of difficulty that expands on Mega Man-esque platforming skills. Not the best title for everyone, but the absolute perfect game for someone.

2. Engaging Gameplay
Graphical improvements have really done as much damage as good to the game industry - it can confuse people into thinking that what they see on screen is the same as what they experience on screen. The truth couldn’t be any further removed - a pretty game with no core gameplay elements is just a long, expensive show reel. To really connect with users, it’s important to challenge them. Where modern games fail to do so, you can respond with tricky puzzle games, complicated platformers, or intensive SRPGs that do more to bring you in to the experience than a perfectly rendered hero.

3. Prices
And if you could get all that at say, $20 instead of $60? It’s amazing how much we’ll pay for games. When you consider the overhead of a large production studio, it makes sense, but this is one aspect small design firms actually benefit from. And since you have no parent company to pay off as well, that money can be pumped directly back into making more games.

Combine all three of these, and you’ve got addictive, quality games at a third the prices of AAA titles. It’s enough to make you reconsider your lifelong ambition of working as an animator for Blizzard. Making premium games is rewarding, but being independent certainly has its own perks.