Problem for 1993 is that it's up against 1998, a close third. It may lose in this round.

1993, let's see:

Doom
Day of the Tentacle
Myst
NBA Jam
Link's Awakening
Sonic CD
Sam and Max Hit the Road
Gabriel Knight: Sins of our Fathers
Super Street Fighter 2
Megaman 6

Not bad either.

Well, there's the fact that Brood War was just updated for modern PCs and released for free.

Snark aside, I do understand your point. I happen to like rally racing games, and until Dirt Rally came out, there had been a 10-year gap since the last really good rally game I had seen on a console. Not to say there hadn't been any, strictly speaking, but not any I thought were worthwhile.

Expanding production budgets mean a narrower range of fiction and mechanics get explored.

That is just factually incorrect.

What low budget game brought raids and integrated co-op play to FPS like Destiny did?
What low budget game gave us the storytelling and narrative freedom of Until Dawn?
What low budget game did open world as well as MGS V, Horizon Zero Dawn, or Breath of the Wild?
What low budget game is telling a story as rich and believable as Uncharted 4?

Where are these games with small production budgets that do interesting things that last?

If what you say is true, then Kickstarter would be flooded with cool, interesting, low budget games. No publishers, and you answer only to the fans right? And what are we getting from kickstarter? What are former masters of their craft like John Romero and Tim Schafer using it for?

Retro games. Oh…

Large developers and big publishers can take more risks, not fewer. They have the resources to follow up with cool new ideas, but more importantly, they can absorb failures. Just look at the history of games.

Plus, people have heterodox tastes. Let's say I'm a big fan of Brood War and Homeworld. What do I have to be excited about this year?

Uh, the Starcraft HD re-master? :-p

... and 2017 has Horizon Zero Dawn, so it wins this contest by default :)

And Persona 5, which I was really enjoying, but had to stop playing until I can get past Atlus' disabling of the Share button (it outright inspired me to finally fix my computer after years without it, just to get to use the capture card, if that's any indication).

... and 2017 has Horizon Zero Dawn, so it wins this contest by default :)

Still not better than 2010 with Vanquish or 2013 with Metal Gear Solid Rising Revengence.

- No text -

- No text -

To say nothing of the games themselves,

Halo 2 essentially single handedly created modern online console FPSs, and Half-Life 2 pioneered a lot of tech we have been seeing in games since, from HDR to weird subsurface scattering on peoples' faces, to guns made to manipulate physics. WoW, more than games like Everquest, brought MMORPGs to the mainstream. My MOM knows what WoW is, and she doesn't know the difference between Sony and Nintendo.

These games introduced these things to the public and did them so well that the industry was changed.

Sonic and Knuckles wasn't even a very good game, and the thing it introduced to the world was being able to play Sonic 2 with a new character...which admittedly is very cool.