Originally Posted by Dhruin
A game made with a small budget is obvious. It simply takes man-hours to produce high-grade, cutting-edge graphics and the comparison with any AAA game is immediately obvious.

Yes, game development doesn't yet scale down as easily as film production (Requiem had fully a fiftieth the production budget of Pirates of the Caribbean 2), but that'll change. Content creation could cost orders of magnitude less than it does now. With better tools, you could build models by snapping them together from parts, morphing them with simple controls, and painting on materials. You could get animation for free. Once tool development proceeds down the path illuminated by Spore, the productivity of a small team will skyrocket. You'll see.