*Edit* My OCD couldn't take it anymore, @jefferz. I fixed the broken quote box in your OP.
What does it matter if it is an Indy game?
I've been playing
Stardew Valley to piggyback on the nostalgia time with
Diablo II today. I can't believe how addictive an unabashed farming game is.
*Edit*
So the 75% plus rated games which are almost all Indy games. The ones that aren't indy and are great are Total War and Civ and what?
Okay, first,
@warriorscomeout, that's not what Occam's Razor means. I wasn't contradicting you.
Second, in mulling this over, I suddenly realized that Metacritic's charts provide the necessary data to offer a hypothesis that explains your attitude. As a console gamer you've been shoveled so much shit via the PSN store or Xbox Live or Nintendo sales or whatever and other glorified ad spamming that you've come to believe that indie games are all shit.
Nay, not the case. It's only on consoles that they're shit! After all, just look at those charts.
The PC platform boasts more exclusives in the 75-89 range on Metacritic than every other platform combined...doubled.
In fact, it has 190 vs. 29 total exclusives in that range vs. the PS4 for these years: the duration of the 8th generation of consoles (and it's 16 vs. 16 for the 90+ game range). The standard for non-shit is clearly at a superior and more optimal, lower incidence on PC.
Keep in mind that these aren't just strategy games, either. They run the gamut of genre. Even the great AAA PC exclusives aren't restricted to
RTS/Strategy. There is also the
Simulation genre (life sim, flight sim, business sim, construction sim, sports franchise management, etc). Then there are the F2P games like the
MOBAs
League of Legends and
Dota 2. There's also
RPGs like
Pillars of Eternity and
World of Warcraft. The eSports world will claim supremacy from the PC platform for titles like
CS:GO.
All sorts of games out there eventually get ported to consoles (and often the ports are inferior or even poorly written).
Diablo III is a past example.
Path of Exile for Xbox One is an upcoming example. There are also those rarer instances of console exclusives where the PC shares the title with only a single console (
Titanfall, No Man's Sky,
Pyre, etc). Finally, don't forget one set of "exclusives" that doesn't show up and thus entails hidden ranking deflation for PCs is the lack of new scoring for every game out there with modding.
Furthermore, remember that services like "PS Now" and "Xbox Pass" are somewhat of a curious novelty to PC gamers who have long relied on freeware to game as much as their hearts delight-- plucking any game from a console's complete library for no cost-- on
any console that is 2+ generations back from the current crop.