First let me start off by stating that i am only 23, so I don't believe its age that has changed my taste nor do I think its the lack of great games, but something has happened to me just this past year - I don't seem to be enjoying huge AAA titles anymore. At least not as much as I use to it!

Games that I have started to absolutely adore are cheap indie titles, I LOVE minecraft, I adore torchlight and I find Braid and Supermeat boy to be fantastic time killers. This is unusual as only last year I would be mocking these games, boycotting their graphics and simplicity whiles't playing the hell out of games like Skyrim, Red Dead and COD. Now I can't even get into these types of games, I purchased Borderlands 2 and have buyers remorse, not because its not a good game but because I just can't get into these anymore, I would rather play 2-3 hours of minecraft then I would Borderlands or Starcraft.

Now I don't know if the fact that I have started college now and hoping to get into university next year forcing me to work extremely hard has any effect on this - I'm sure it has some - or whether my tastes in games have just changed because these indies titles are a new phenomenon and they are so easily obtained (apple store, Steam, XBLA), heck this may just be a temporary flavour of the month type afair. I guess time will tell.

So what do you guys think it is, and are any of you going through the same right now?

JUDAS!

The good games aren't always those that spend half their budget on advertisment. That's a good lesson to learn.

Indie games are the future!

I predict in the future we will see a "middle" market appear. Games that aren't indie, but aren't AAA. I predict many successful indie dev's will gradually morph into these middle tiered developers. Over the years some may succeed and graduate to AAA, some may go back to indie depending on success. Others die off entirely as it always is. I fail to see why there is this pervasive attitude about needing to develop only AAA games. Perhaps a game doesn't need to be AAA to be a success. So this new niche market is slowly building even now. Companies that have much larger budgets than indies, but ultimately not the enourmous budgets of AAA. They will have to still focus on developing good game first since they can't afford so much marketing and other nonsense.

Who knows, could be wrong.

That's not unusual, you've just realized that a game doesn't need all that high budget fluff to have fun gameplay.

You're growing up. A lot of the AAA games are shallow.

Triple-A titles appeal to a wider consumer base and therefore make more money.

Well a lot of times indie games have very different types of gameplay that a AAA developer wouldn't dare try for fear of alienating some of their possible buyers and losing profit, and instead these big developers just stick with the tried and true formula that they know will make them money. Indie developers have a lot more freedom, so they can create very different, and sometimes strange, games.

You're probably just tired of playing the same old same old like many other gamers are, which is why the popularity of indie games is exploding.