The original DOS was practically indie. Doom and Quake were indie. Roller Coaster Tycoon was indie and built on Assembly. Minecraft was indie. Dwarf Fortress, U

The original DOS was practically indie. Doom and Quake were indie. Roller Coaster Tycoon was indie and built on Assembly. Minecraft was indie. Dwarf Fortress, Ultima Ratio Regum, and Rimworld are indie. If anything, evidence suggests that indie is capable of tackling the hardest problems. How? I would argue that once something is done as a group, there's deadlines. Deadlines create cruft (aka tech debt). Cruft slows down development. You end up with product teams who are incentivized to constantly push out something as opposed to dealing with tech debt. Things that would normally take a month solo end up taking five man months. Instead of running something through your head, there are UX/product/event storming workshops. You also have to adopt industrial architecture approaches like "clean architecture". You can't pick up obscure codebases like Lisp, or experimental features. Non indie rewards consistency. You can only be consistent by avoiding risks, and doing a lot of CYA. Basically, the difference between indie and non-indie is like your obscure cafe and Starbucks.