Hyper real AAA games maybe, but some of the biggest and most money making games like Minecraft were private creations of a person or small team. Minecraft by all accounts has gotten much worse and less popular after Microsoft bought it--people still prefer the old java version vs. newer Microsoft developed editions.

Minecraft was like 10 years old when it was purchased. It’a remarkable it’s still actively played at all. Most games would have died off and had a sequel released in that time.

Minecraft is the exception that proves the rule. There have been perhaps 5 indie games in the last 10 years that made it big money wise.

Yes, well, the fact is that only a teeny tiny fraction of indie games gets even the remote possibility of a glimmer of a hope of achieving something even closely resembling any kind of popularity. The vast majority of game releases on Steam just sell maybe a few 100 copies. That's it. These games just don't get seen. The market is too flooded with releases for any conceivable storefront to display that catalog fairly.

AAA is generally a budgetary designation. Minecraft was built as an indie game, then bought by a massive studio. It doesn't become AAA because of who owns it.

I don't know if that's true from a business perspective. I suspect that twice as many people (ie customers) use Minecraft across all the platform ports now than did before the acquisition, despite what the oldtimers have to say about Bedrock Edition.

The China edition launched in 2017. It has 500 million users as of Oct 2021. It's based on Bedrock Edition, not Java. This is 100% a Microsoft scaling thing.