With the popularity of indie games I wonder why publishers don’t just try and buy out hundreds of these small devs under their shop. And I’m not talking like how when ea buys dice and ruins dice. That is the whole problem. Total autonomy should be offered. The publisher should exist solely as a balancer of budgets: skim profit when sales happen to pay for shops when dev work before a sale is to be done. No different than say a city department paying into the general fund and other department supported by the general fund.

Publishers that want to work with indie studios are already accepting 100s of pitches and choose 0.1% they like. If a big publisher will buy a lot of small indie studios you'll soon see titles in a press like "{PUBLISHERNAME} force developers to live on ramen and work 12 / 6".

Simply because working on very tight budget likely 12/6 is how indie games are made. And to be honest in modern economy having any budget at all is kind a success already. So I'd belive most of small games are built on enthusiasm and founders own money.

Vast majority of "indie" games budgets are in range of $100,000 and $300,000 total. Over that amount there is gap where no one invest except few rich, successful and picky publishers. Getting more funding for a small-scale project is extremely hard so if your game needs more then it's must be AA project for at least $2,000,000+ budget. But AA+ means $40+ price tag, completely different production quality and large team so very few kind of games fit the math.

PS: I co-founder of a small gamedev studio and I know quite a few other people in this industry.

PSS: I'm happy to be wrong though. So if you know how to get game funded I have 4 cool playable prototypes to build into a game, team of 10+ devs and we track record for 3 released titles including one for consoles.

The short answer is that for a company like Ubisoft or EA, big blockbusters are much more reliable and more profitable than indie games. Not that smaller games can’t do amazingly well, but most don’t make a profit, and the risk doesn’t justify the expenditure for that kind of company.

Also, like another poster mentioned, there already exists a host of creativity in these AAA companies, that’s not the problem. The problem is making something that will reliably keep the company in the black.

> With the popularity of indie games I wonder why publishers don’t just try and buy out hundreds of these small devs under their shop.

Because they don't have to. In most cases, to have a large successful game, developers need publishers. Publishers are who negotiate with Steam or Gog or EA. Publishers are who figure out in the in-game microtransaction economy. Publishers are who do all the promotional activities like getting famous streamers to play the game.

The gaming community never seems to understand this. Who they think of as "the devs" are often actually the publisher.