It seems the mainstream games industry already recognizes the benefit of innovation outside of just realism, etc, and invests in developing it to some extent. See: Wii, Portal, Whatever Spielberg Thinks He's Doing, Will Wright's crazy new technology, Little Big Planet. So your cynicism seems misplaced?
Portal is based on
Narbacular Drop, an indie/student game (with terrible graphic design). Little Big Planet essentially comes from the indie studio that did
Rag-Doll Kung Fu.
That said, Sony and Microsoft deserve credit for opening up XBLA and PXN to indie developers working on interesting things.
The mainstream definitely still has big hero teams for me like Miyamoto/Nintendo, Ueda/Sony, Michael Ancel/Ubisoft, Team Ninja, etc.
Player
