Indie AAA games are doomed to fail, so why should every indie engine developer bother with so called "next gen" features?
To be very honest: There is no indie engine delivering AAA "next gen" features. All these tools have some drawbacks. Even technology like C4 with lots of modern techniques (e.g. voxel terrain, portals, shader editor) still misses some features of the big ones.
If you want to mess with AAA technology, then you can play with the editor of Unreal Tournament 3. But it still is not "next gen". It is "current gen".
Next generation will be something like sculpting a game in real-time without polygons, only pixels and textures. John Carmack has visions like this.
Basically we shouldn't judge others by our own standards - everyone needs different tools.
Yes. And I think nobody did something like that in this thread. People just compared different tools. If you want to make a small little simulator (like you mentioned) or a puzzle game or a physics game - you still have some tools to choose. And it makes sense to check them. Not the latest shader might be the reason but maybe the availability on different platforms.
I read a lot about the huge success of browser games lately. And I often read from Indies that their games sell better on Mac than on PC. And there is a huge wave of success of smaller games on iPhone now.
