Flixel, Flashpunk, XNA, Unity, Unreal Engine, Cryengine, Ogre3d, SDL, Allegro, libtcod, Tengine, SFML, Construct, GameMaker, Scratch, Stencyl, Cocos2d, Kobold2d, libgdx, corona, BlitzBasic, Monkey, and on and on all available for free or very little money.

Steam, Humble Bundle, GamersGate, Desura, Indie Royale, Xbox Live Indie Games, iOS app store, Google Play all there to sell your game. Or just do it yourself on your website with paypal or stripe.

Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, 8-Bit Funding if you need funding.

Yeah, game development sure is awful these days.

All of this is true. I'd add to this by saying that as depressing as a million COD clones is, see it as a maturing of the industry, and as a positive thing. Most movies are trash, most TV is trash, most music is trash, most books are trash^, and now-- congratulations-- most games are trash too. All that means is that the industry is more popular and catering to lots of audiences. Amazing stuff still gets made on the periphery, just like every other medium.

^Of course there are more good books than there are good games or movies etc, but that medium has had thousands of years to produce winners and forget the bad apples. If you ignore the accumulated history of books you'll see that the top selling books are, in order: Romance novels (especially now with eBooks as people feel less embarrassed about buying them), self-help books, and then the popular trash you actually see advertised everywhere (Harry Potter, Twilight, 50 Shades of Grey etc)

I'm sorry but lumping in Harry Potter along with "popular trash" such as Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey is shamefully dismissive.

Harry Potter is a wonderful series that brought the magic of reading and exploring imaginative worlds to countless children around the world.

Hardly "trash" as you characterized it.

And I'm sure Twilight brought the magic of reading and exploring imaginative worlds to countless teenage girls around the world too, that doesn't make it "good" fiction (you seem to also think Twilight is "trash"), it just makes it popular fiction.

The only descriptor you use is 'wonderful' so I'm not really sure why you think they're good. While I'm here: IMO (I read most of them) they were not particularly well written (the first one especially) and didn't have anything particularly interesting to say. I feel they filled that generations need for an Enid Blyton-style series of kids getting into scrapes, nothing more. Those kids could have read a plethora of other books with the same result.

If we deftly weave this back to the original topic: AAA gaming being terrible, we can note that Call of Duty brings countless hours of pleasure to spotty teenage boys all round the globe too. It does not, however, make them 'good' games (as the original commenter that I was responding too complained about)

Congratulations, you're covered in nostalgia.

The games industry used to be just as covered in me-too crap. Today's AAA games are more consistently good experiences than they ever were in the past, though they're just as samey as well. The one difference is, the indie movement of today is much stronger than it has ever been- even back when being 'indie' wasn't far from being mainstream.

Emphatic agreement. The modern indie game ecosystem is so amazingly vibrant it's unbelievable. We have stuff like humble bundle. We have steam and the various app stores for easy sales channels without needing a publisher. But more than that, people are so much more sophisticated about what makes an engaging quality game at every budget level. This does have bizarre corner cases like FarmVille.

Point being, we're in a gaming golden age whether we want to admit it or not.

I have been a professional in the game industry for 17 years. Every one of them someone was saying it USED to be great/ creative / exciting etc. Whatever! Someone is always doing something cool, someone is always doing something lame.

Where there are shadows there is light.