Just to go further with what Imago is saying:
A game like Darwinia would never be made for a console. It's just too esoteric. But it's an awesome game, and an awesome example with what one can do with aesthetic. And this is coming from someone who doesn't like RTS games.
Dofus would never fly as a console concept. As above. a small company can make a small flash game with relatively low production costs. Dofus has thousands of happy, paying players -- now, that may not seem like much compared to console sales, but if you have 15,000 people paying $7 a month... well, you do the math. A small garage company can be very profitable with that model, and the benefit to gamers is a wider variety of games, more choice.
Now, there are some surprises on consoles. Take Katamari Damacy for example. However, I think that's the exception that proves the rule; Katamari was produced by Namco, an already large compnay; they could afford to take the risk, and it was even a calculated risk, being a game that already made money in Japan so it only had to recoup distribution costs in the US. If an idependent, small company had come up with the concept for Katamari, we probably never would have seen it because it just would have been too much of a risk to put the money into development.
