Why are indie games more interesting?

Anybody with even a passing interest in the gaming industry would remark that an unsettling number of mainstream titles are painfully unoriginal testosterone fueled first person shooters. But your best sellers, such as Call of Duty and Fear, are so incredibly popular that it'd be seen by any shareholder as financial suicide to deviate from the tried and true formula.

Now for this we only have ourselves to blame, games like call of duty make such an obscene amount of money because for some obscure reason we buy it on mass. The gaming industry is just that, and industry, company execs are tasked with meeting the proposed demand while taking as little risk with their massive budgets as physically possible, simple business sense. Games are made and produced by committee, any level of individual creativity is diluted and distilled by the desire to amass incredible wealth in an industry that notoriously punishes originality.

But how are indie titles different? It almost always goes down to the fact they tend to have vastly reduced budgets, this means the developers can afford to take many more risks and appeal to a much smaller audience in order to get their investments back. This usually means that you end up with a much more focused product, one that is creatively more vibrant. This does not necessarily mean that you're going to end up with a better experience, but it certainly ensures that you get a measure of originality that would otherwise be stifled by financial concerns. Smaller budgets also mean they can't pour copious amounts of money developing high definition graphics. This instantly turns off the majority of the mainstream