...at this stage in your gaming 'career'? Forget about first-party stuff, for the sake of this discussion.

It just dawned on me that Indie support is now way more important to me. The occasional third-party action game is always welcome, but I neither care for Games As A Service, nor movielike experiences. And lots of my favorite genres, like arcade racers, are pretty much dead.

But Indies have been consistently exciting, and much more prolific, collectively. Sure, they're not all great, but there are enough great ones to completely occupy my gaming time. I can totally see why someone with a Wii U could find the Switch's 2018 to be disappointing, thus far, but I've been in hog heaven.

I agree with pretty much everything you said. Most of the big third party efforts are AAA fluff, and the best indie efforts on the system are more interesting than the average AAA game, IMO.

I'd still want to see some good third party support from a few devs out there (Bethesda's been good to me, I'm still dreaming of playing RE7 on the go, and would love to see Atlus put Etrian Odyssey on the Switch in the future), but overall I feel as if (certain) indies have more to offer as a complement to Nintendo's brilliant first party stuff.

I'll add that I did enjoy novel/arcadey A and AA games, and still might, if they still existed. AAA games never really appealed to me in the first place. So maybe my tastes haven't really changed. Just the gaming landscape.

Also, I'd never turn down additional third-party support, of course. The more games, the better!

@Anand
Yeah, I suppose it's implied in my reply even though I didn't consciously think about it, but the big third parties don't really do the midrange games anymore, do they. It's one of the reasons I look back upon the Wii era so fondly, the abundance of small and medium sized efforts.

Third-parties.

Hard to say. I buy more indie games than 3rd party retail games for sure nowadays, but a big part of that is also just that they're cheaper. On the other hand something like Persona 5 comes around and not much indie matches that.

@r_hjort
The Wii was definitely the last bastion for AA games. Nintendo themselves still make some, though. Hmm... actually, where would Kirby fall? It almost always sells a million.

AAA was originally a term that defined marketing spend, anyway.

Japanese third-party support. A lot of western third-party support is in genres I don't care about, or has a lot of that extra fluff. But I'm excited as heck for new Mega Man, Ace Attorney and Dragon Quest games!

@TriforceBun
The few third-party games that interest me are definitely from Japan. I was going to mention that, but I'm trying not to be so... Japanese-ist.

Don't care either way. So long as I have fun games to play, I don't care where they come from.

I can understand why people would prefer Indies from a perspective of individual taste, but for purely practical reasons I would prefer Third-party support. More third party support = better overall support=more indies. Everyone wins!

Also unfortunately the nature of the game means that the third parties tend to have a higher profile so their offerings don't fly under my radar as much as the multitude of indie titles do.

@Shadowlink
That's cheating! (I think that you'd probably answer third-parties, anyway, though.)

@Shadowlink Hmm. I wonder though if it's not almost the opposite... that indies thrive on the Switch because it is selling A TON OF CONSOLES but it doesn't really have many retail games worth looking at. So people buy it for Zelda and Mario or whatever, then end up buying a few indie games because there isn't much else?

Seems plausible. Of course, this wouldn't work if the Switch wasn't selling A TON OF CONSOLES.

Now I'm curious about software sales on the Switch. They can't be super high... can they? What are people buying outside of the Nintendo games?!

As an Indie Dev now, I care most about people supporting Indie Devs! Cough cough.

But as a gamer, I still care far more about 3rd party support on Switch. Indie stuff is nice, and I enjoy it a TON on Mobile and PC, but generally I'm not a huge fan of Indie on consoles. It just never grabbed me in the same way, personally. Of course, it also depends on what we consider "Indie" these days. Like, Snipperclips and Overcooked are amazing, but seem big enough that they are 3rd party titles in my eyes more than Indie games. So these days maybe the lines are so blurry that it's hard to tell where one begins and the other ends.

For some reason "Indie on Consoles" in my mind registers "Pixel art." Like, automatically, for some reason. Huh.

@J.K. Riki some of that pixel art can be gorgeous though.

I'm actually sitting on a fat eShop wallet at the moment, because I haven't seen anything on the Switch eShop which has jumped out at me. Maybe once there are better sales...
On the other hand, I have a laundry list of third-party titles I'd like to see on Switch.

Though I kind of feel like the lines between "indie" and "third-party" are pretty blurred at this point, and people seem to have different definitions of it. So I'm not sure if anything I'm counting as "third-party" is also indie.