AAA games are, largely, quite bad in quality these days. Unfortunately, the desire to make a quality product (from the people who actually make the games) is overruled by the desire to maximize profit (from the people who pay their salaries). Indie games are still great, but I barely even bother to glance at AAA stuff any more.

  > by the desire to

I'm just wondering if/when anyone will realize that often desire gets in the way of achieving. ̶T̶h̶e̶y̶ ̶m̶a̶y̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶p̶e̶n̶n̶y̶ ̶w̶i̶s̶e̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶'̶r̶e̶ ̶p̶o̶u̶n̶d̶ ̶f̶o̶o̶l̶i̶s̶h̶.̶ Chasing pennies with dollars

That has been like that since there have been publishers in the games industry.

Back then, the indies stuff was only if you happened to live nearby someone you knew doing bedroom coding, distributing tapes on school, or they got lucky land their game on one of those shareware tapes collection.

Trying to actually get a publisher deal was really painful, and if you did, they really wanted their money back in sales.