You won’t get that from AAA studios: that’s largely indie territory today.

The issue with creating novel and interesting gameplay is that it’s not a straight-line process. It takes a lot of experimentation and failure. That doesn’t match with the large teams and assembly-line process of AAA game development.

An indie game developer, especially one who just works on the game in their free time but otherwise has a day job, is 100% free to experiment and redo their game design hundreds of times. Often this doesn’t mean throwing the game away but instead making lots of small games for game jams or just to build a portfolio of projects.

Couple that with the fact there aren’t nearly as many AAA studios as there are indie game developers working on hobby projects and you can see why AAAs are at such a disadvantage when it comes to experimenting with novel and innovative game designs. Indie game don’t need to all be successful to make it hard on AAAs: out of thousands of indie games only one needs to be successful.