That might be true, but the implicit assumption here is that only EA can make AAA games and indie developers just produce crap. That assumption has been demonstrated to be false on both points.
Not at all! You can buy a few C++ game engines (e.g. Torque) and port them. I have Torque running on Linux, Solaris, Mac, & Windows. Considering it's normal posix underneath, you just have to redo some plumbing.
The iPhone is POSIX, but not to you as the developer. Porting Torque to the iPhone will have to be done by GarageGames, not by you - even if you pull it off it will certainly be violating a laundry list of App Store rules.
Well, for one thing, you have no file system - and that's just first among the list of POSIX-y things that Apple internally has access to, but you do not as a 3rd-party.
The amount of plumbing to be ripped out is pretty extreme given that you don't have access to large bits of the OS.
Not to mention Torque is not written with OpenGL ES in mind - so you'd have to rewrite not only plumbing, but some core graphics code.
To make it an Apple-compliant app, porting Torque (or most desktop engines for that matter) is simply not feasible/worthwhile.
The question is who the next AAA title makers are going to be. What kind of culture will they emerge from? What will be the platform of choice for the first game of that as yet unknown small company that is going to be the next the AAA title maker?
