"The best games I played recently are all indie stuff that I could have played on a much older machine."
If you try it, you may discover that's not the case. A lot of indie stuff is taking advantage of faster computers to use things with higher levels of abstraction, and indie games often have really quite terrible levels of performance relative to the complexity of the game as compared to a AAA title. They run at 60fps because they're net simpler, and a lot of times you may find they're barely running at 60fps on a medium-class machine.
I'm not complaining, because the alternative is often that the game simply wouldn't exist if the only choice the developers had was to drop straight into C++ and start bashing away with OpenGL directly.
I think this is a really good point. It's true that indie games are often simple, and don't use complex graphical features. But it's also true that a lot of them are startlingly memory-heavy and poorly implemented - they're comparable to AAA performance, but for a vastly simpler task. Every so often something like Dungeons of Dredmor will bog down on me despite being a very basic task on a high-end machine.
I don't object to that, either. People are knocking out games in high-level languages or using extremely rich frameworks. You can put out an Android game and barely touch a single Android feature because your environment is so extensive. We do pay a price in speed and memory usage, but the upside is that people get to release all kinds of wild projects without learning the arcana of their environment.
It's fantastic that a team of <5 people with limited software expertise can put out a genuinely brilliant game. I'm less happy with it outside of gaming, where people often have to standardize on a single product. But video games are moving steadily closer to boardgames, novels, and other art forms where the tools of the trade aren't a limiting factor.
If you try it, you may discover that's not the case. A lot of indie stuff is taking advantage of faster computers to use things with higher levels of abstraction, and indie games often have really quite terrible levels of performance relative to the complexity of the game as compared to a AAA title. They run at 60fps because they're net simpler, and a lot of times you may find they're barely running at 60fps on a medium-class machine.
I'm not complaining, because the alternative is often that the game simply wouldn't exist if the only choice the developers had was to drop straight into C++ and start bashing away with OpenGL directly.