What? Have you seen the GOTY and most anticipated games list in here each year?
There's very little chance for non AAA games to be on the top 10 list, let alone win it. AAA is the most popular games in Era.
Moreover—and I've been tracking this year to year—the "most anticipated" list at the end of every year tends to be an exceptionally reliable predictor of the following year's GOTY list, give or take a bit of movement up and down a few places, plus the rare breakout like Celeste or the fizzling of a formerly hot property like Ni no Kuni. The highly anticipated games that are known quantities far in advance are not the plucky low-budget affairs.
It's also important to recognize the huge spectrum running from the truly mass-market fare (CoD, FIFA, GTA) to the prestigious big-budget middlebrow (Naughty Dog, Kojima). You'll see a whole range of big mass-audience titles where an established core audience still dominates the conversation (Smash, Pokémon, to some extent Borderlands or Assassin's Creed), so it's hard to pin a category on any of these, but I think we can generally agree that there is some kind of subjective difference between the mega-productions that get attention here and the ones that don't.
I'm personally uninterested in most of these to the point that I never saw enough of a case to pick up a PS4, and have disliked this general direction for the top end of the industry since the PS1/N64 era (even though "AAA" as we term it these days only truly solidified with the PS3/360). I particularly dislike how certain genres or tendencies, including ones I enjoy, have come to dominate the local imagination of what a "core" or "enthusiast" game looks like. There isn't one monolithic thing as a video game culture—more of an agglomeration of countless intersecting subcultures—and there is a certain narrow-mindedness among those who are in denial about this. Around here you see these subcultures collide more often than usual because the forum isn't broken down into an archipelago of subsections, so asking if you're in the majority or minority is typically meaningless. Everybody thinks there is a bias, and everybody, in their own way, is right.
The trend lines are a little more complex than that, but what we can say is that there is definitely a dominant consensus here about which video games matter, and that a certain kind of big-budget, heavily marketed experience is part of that story. I'd say that a bigger part of that story is a sense of institutional continuity with what games media considered important back in the late '90s to 2000s, and specifically since the establishment of the Sony/MS/Nintendo holding pattern. The interests and biases around here would be highly recognizable to forum posters from back then.
