That's an interesting point of view. I'm less interested in multiplayer games today than I was in the 90s, but I'm glad to report that single player games seem to be doing rather well. I just finished Arkham Origins, and thus find the statement "it's not about game play" a little tough to believe.
It is worth noting that Arkham Origins is from the completely opposite end of the spectrum to all these indie hit games that were covered in this article.
Making big titles like Arkham Origins requires a lot of money and the big AAA titles are often very conservative.
Contrast this with DayZ, Minecraft, Don't starve, Kerbal Space Program and others mentioned in this article. By comparison to AAA titles, these games are difficult, don't include a story line, have a tightly knit community, were built with a small budget and team, were released with "early access" etc. They are big hits that aren't AAA games, and this kind of phenomenon did not really exist (in such a large scale) in the 1990s. There were indie hits and popular shareware games but none of them were commercial successes.
There will always be AAA games just as there will be Hollywood movies. But the indie megahit phenomenon is a rather new development in the field of gaming. The article wasn't really about the decline of AAA games as it was about the rise of indie games.
