The AAA bubble burst a while ago. Complete AAA games rarely release anymore because studios keep trying to push the boundary on scope and size instead of focusing on quality.
The limited size of indie games means they’ll always have the capability to ship complete. They don’t always because the teams are much smaller and less experienced, but I’ve always found more enjoyment out of a passionate indie game than a corporatized AAA.
What’s with this focus on the word “complete”? Usually I just see it from people salty about the idea that a game ever gets DLC, but we’re rarely seeing the kinds of things we saw in the late 00s and early 2010s where games would have a “missing chapter” or whatever, so if something about modern games is being described by how “complete” they are, it seems like a bad descriptor to me.
More that now that patches are easy to implement across any platform you don’t have to ship something that works well day 1 anymore, nor does it need everything that should be out at release. Often that means people release a game well before it should have released and charge full price for a game that is literally incomplete. Great example would be No Man’s Sky which was “complete” (based on their advertisements) maybe 3 years ago(whenever they implemented actual multiplayer finally)? And came out 7 years ago.
There’s a kind of qualitative difference between a game that was built to be played and later has DLC released for it and a game that is essentially built as a DLC platform. The latter has become extremely common in AAA games and it winds up feeling incomplete because the insertion points for planned DLC are usually quite noticable.
I think this definition gets diluted by those who would call something like a Paradox game incomplete just because there are only so many features you can build for a systems-driven game like that in a few years of development time, and they naturally expand on it over time. But out of dozens of expansions, there are people who say all of them are absolutely necessary to get the “complete” experience when realistically they’d never engage with even half of the expansion features anyway.
