15 years, eight eras: The rise of indies and open-world games
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Game development has changed enormously over the last 15 years—and understanding how we got here tells us a lot about where it’s heading next.
To mark 15 Years in the Game, we asked our experts to look back at how the industry has evolved and reflect on the biggest shifts they’ve lived through. Together, they identified eight defining eras that changed how modern games are made.
This four-part series explores those turning points and what they reveal about the evolution of game development. Whether you’re building games, leading production, or shaping studio strategy, these insights offer context for today’s challenges and tomorrow’s opportunities.
In part one, we look at how the rise of indie studios and the industry’s embrace of open worlds reshaped player expectations, production pipelines, and development at scale.
The indie renaissance (2011–2014)
This first era saw the rise of smaller teams working with digital distribution and increasingly accessible development tools. The result was a wave of creatively ambitious titles that pushed the envelope to critical and commercial acclaim. Soon, success was no longer reserved for large publishers: the indies proved that innovation, strong artistic vision and focused design could leave a lasting mark on the industry.
Julien Proux, Chief Content Officer
“What changed most from 2011 wasn’t that smaller studios could make games. It’s that they could reach an audience, build a community and establish a commercially viable IP without ever passing through traditional publishing.
“Constraint became an advantage. Fewer layers, faster decisions, and a much closer relationship between creator and player.
“Minecraft is the clearest illustration. It began with an extremely small footprint, grew in public through its community, and became a global cultural platform.
It proved that the relationship with the player could become bi-directionnal and that community was now part of of development itself.”
Dmytro Koval, Executive Art Director
“That whole period was huge. In four years, a console generation ended, Twitch took live streaming mainstream, and Kickstarter let indie developers fund their own ideas. Developers no longer needed a big AAA budget. They bet on originality and their own taste instead. Microsoft’s purchase of Minecraft in 2014 was the strongest proof the indie approach worked.
“It’s easy to claim this was the era low fidelity games broke through. But it was more about gameplay, visuals and design creating coherent, unforgettable experiences.
“The evolution is clear. For example, you can also draw a line from Super Meat Boy’s success across 2011, through Shovel Knight in 2014, to Hollow Knight Silksong in 2025.
Without that era, we wouldn’t have Expedition 33 today: proof a small team, with real creative vision and the right partners, can make a masterpiece that stands alongside the industry’s greatest works.”
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The open-world gold rush (2012–2018)
By 2012, players began demanding bigger games with more epic scope. In response, studios embraced the creation of increasingly expansive worlds built around exploration, systemic gameplay and player choice. Delivering on that ambition demanded larger teams, longer production timelines, and entirely new approaches to planning, collaboration and content creation.
Guillaume Carmona, VP of Game Development
“Because open-world design means authoring conditions rather than scripted encounters, the gold rush era saw studios switch to building spaces that generated play, and rules that kept gameplay consistent.
“Far Cry 2 in 2008 learned some early lessons the hard way: the malaria and weapon jamming mechanics interrupted play more than they added immersion.
Far Cry 3 fixed that in 2012, adding a villain strong enough to make the freedom feel purposeful, and became a defining open-world title.
“By 2015, CD Projekt Red leaned on procedural generation for The Witcher 3, since hand-placing content across a continent-sized map didn’t scale.
“And by 2017, Assassin’s Creed Origins had every discipline working in the same shared space instead of discrete levels; a structural change, not just a headcount one.
“Breath of the Wild, arguably Nintendo’s least safe game in decades, was built on smart risk management: a simple 2D prototype tested the physics rules before committing to the full open world. Preproduction had to expand to make room for that, and it’s since become standard practice across the industry.”
Ryan Hawkins, Art Director
“That gold rush era started with two trends converging: consoles got more powerful, and gamers got more sophisticated, creating demand for epic stories told in huge, higher fidelity worlds.
“But bigger worlds didn’t mean bigger timelines or budgets, so studios turned to outsourcing.
That’s where partners like Room 8 Group started to grow.
“Tools evolved just as fast. One example: on the original Ghost Recon, a rough Houdini script built to speed up repetitive fixes grew, step by step, into the road and building systems Ubisoft still uses today.
“And another: on The Division, the team built Snowdrop as a rendering-first engine, not gameplay-first, so artists could focus on beauty while gameplay got layered in after. This allowed for us to explore and test rendering solutions that allowed us to create these demanding large-scale worlds, solving problems that previous engine struggled with from the ground up.
“It was an era of discovery, when internal studios and outside partners were equals, prospecting for the same gold. That’s since settled into something more like a township, with defined roles built by people who each bring a unique skill to the table.”
