Publishers care about quality? Ubisoft Published Beyond Good & Evil & Assassin's Creed Unity, RE Umbrella Corps and VII were published by Capcom, Sonic Mania & Sonic Boom published by Sega. All HUGE names which are 'marketable' because that's what the publishers care about, they have exhibited multiple time that they're content with shipping gold or garbage because they can get away with it and fix it later 'maybe'. Skullgirls lost Konami as its publisher and it's still a great fighting game that went Indie. Yooka-Laylee & Mighty No. 9 picked up a Publisher midway through development, and it appears to have done sod-all for their quality.
I'm sorry for nitpicking but there's so much wrong with this statement. I understand what you mean though, the ratio of indie games worth playing at all is heavily skewed against the guys giving it there all. But surely this is down to lack of industry experience and poor planning, not 'has a publisher Yes / No'.
I think you misunderstand. I'm not saying publishers automatically make good games and push quality, and touched on this in my comments about over-saturation and quality over quantity in general. The core issue is that indie games are constantly being touted as some sort of savior for the industry, flush with fresh and original ideas, here to save us from the stagnation of pro studios. When you boil it down though, you've basically got an assortment of "art" games, puzzle games, walking simulators, 2D throwbacks that pay homage to a game that some pro studio made 20-30 years ago, and tumbled together Unity asset cash-n-grabs. Steam, in particular, is absolutely flooded with them.
Since these are indie games, and lack AAA budgets, they're assessed on different criteria as well, so the bar for greatness is lowered. Cave Story or Super Meat Boy, for instance, are pretty rough looking in a lot of ways, but people love them for plenty of other reasons. Something low budget like Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls? Numerous reviews bagging it for poor visuals, and I'm sure it took more than a few review scores down a peg or two.
I'm not saying a game must have AAA visuals to be good, and I'm not ragging on these games in particular, but we've basically got one barometer for indie games, and one for professional games. Those games got a pass for graphics, Wizardry didn't. Is it really that unfair to say we should judge games on equal footing regardless of who made it, especially when there are countless examples of AAA games with mammoth budgets that are otherwise total crap?
