It is great that Mincraft is as successful as it is. But trying to say that gaming would exist as is without the backing of big companies as is is a joke. Minecraft caters to a niche market.

I'm pretty sure Notch couldn't have cranked out Skyrim on his own, and WoW wouldn't have been developed by a small group of people as a hobby project on their own time. Large and complex games and systems and the like take lots of money to produce a product people will want to play, and without big backing these type of games wouldn't exist.