Late reply but think of it like this: they are financially dependent on themselves. All involved have to secure any and all moneys to enable them to continue their work.
Yeah dunno why Dave the Diver is on there. Nexon is a multimillion dollar company. They made MapleStory and Combat Arms, among many others. They're about as far from indie as you can get.
Censorship doesn't only mean removing content after the fact.
Could also be 'don't do that because 8% of our target market wouldn't like it' during early development or in non public versions. Or silly image stuff like car manufacturers not allowing their licensed cars to show damage in racing games.
Last one is blatantly obvious, the first one, you'll never know about it because it was internal.
Without any evidence to suggest otherwise, it's just baseless conspiracy theory to think some "shadow figure" was secretly pulling the strings to make their preferred evil-capitalist-ideal version of BG3 (lol).
BG3 is indie because they financed the game with money they raised themselves and self-published. It's that simple.
People seem to be forgetting that "AA" game devs companies are an established "category" in video gaming. I wouldn't have considered the Divinity series from the same devs to be indie back when it came out.
Indie to me means a SMALL team (less than 20 total) selling something that is primarily a passion project, and not controlled by a larger entity. IE Minecraft stopped being indie when it was bought by Microsoft even though the team didn't get very large.
Not just multimillion. It is multibillion euro company. And I think it is generally understood they are on the more exploitative end with their games...
When describing a game that looks like it had a smallish team and graphics budget, ‘indie’ is a useful shorthand. It sets certain expectations.
Certainly marketing and media (as evidenced by the article) find this useful, but I think many consumers also are more interested in the game than in the creators. So it makes sense that this language shift happens.
But yes it certainly misses the theoretical point of a category like that.
And would be nice if it was replaced with a technically correct word. ‘Indie-like’?
I agree that indie has become an aesthetic. I suppose it was inevitable that once major game companies saw gamers embrace the creativity and freedom indie games brought they'd try to capitalize on that "trend" themselves in the most shallow way possible.
It seems like with every successful break from mainstream culture you'll see corporations attempting to capture the counterculture and homogenize it back into something they can control and sell back to the same people who tried to free themselves from those same corporations and the constraints they imposed in us in the first place.
This battle has already been raging in the film industry for decades. Technically, an independent film is anything financed independently of the major film distributors. This includes some very expensive effects-driven movies like Luc Besson's Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, which makes this definition not particularly useful to the average moviegoer.
So instead most people stick to a more loosely defined colloquial definition, rooted more in a film's budget and artistic aspirations, that often includes "indie-like" films from notable indie filmmakers, but financed directly by one of the major studios.
I suppose, but it rolls off the tongue way better than "not triple-A", which I think is in the ballpark of what most people are shooting for when they use "indie" to indicate an aesthetic or vibe.
The technical status of a game or developer as independent is very rarely relevant to me, except as a signal that they are more likely to produce games that exhibit the "indie" vibe.
Funding is a bit of a red herring since there are plenty of "indie" developers/studios producing games with funding of all kinds (kickstarter, presales, even VC, etc).
My opinion as someone actively working in the field is simple: an indie game is a game where the creator(s) of the game have full control over its vision.
Funding is adjacent in that those who've funded are the most likely ones to be able to exert control over the finished product, but funding is the enabler, not the result.
As soon as the creator(s) of the game start to sacrifice their vision of the game in favor of stakeholder demands, it very quickly falls out of that "indie" category for me.
>As soon as the creator(s) of the game start to sacrifice their vision of the game in favor of stakeholder demands, it very quickly falls out of that "indie" category for me.
I don't think that's really true. Customers are stakeholders and listening to customer feedback and making changes even if they conflict with your initial vision can be a good thing!
Listening to customer feedback doesn’t mean implementing features they want. It means understanding the issues they’re having within the context of what you’re making. For example all the soulslike games have been heavily patched after release based on player feedback, the most obvious recent case being the tutorial entrance in Elden Ring.
In the beta most players missed it or avoided it so they added a bunch of signposting and at launch that was still the case so they added a fourth wall breaking on screen prompt explaining that it was the tutorial.
When you're talking about indie vs AAA game, you're generally talking about the overall design, not random bug fixes or very minor usability improvements like your tutorial entrance.
In the case of soulsbornes, it's death as a game mechanic and adding a bit more difficulty [1].
[1] ... although they mostly have the most fair difficulty i've seen in video games.
Sure let’s shift the goalposts. When you’re making a product you generally want to know you’ll get a return on your investment. Understanding the market viability of a game idea is important to a company like From Software. Including Demon Souls where they underestimated how successful it would be IIRC but still cared about the potential because they (plus probably a large amount from Sony as the publisher) were spending several million dollars to make it!
My example of the tutorial is just refuting your point using your example by showing that the mentioned genre studios do listen to customer feedback. Another one would be the beta they ran for the game in the first place.
Well, I'm pretty sure the games I enjoy and the spirit they were developed in is not compatible to just viewing them as a 'product'. So we're really talking about different things here.
Maybe not, but Hades was initially released as early access so that the developers could work with the initial players to polish the gameplay and change features around until it landed. And I don't think anyone's going to say Supergiant Games is therefore not independent.
One of the advantages of indie games is that devs are making the games they want, not games that appeal to customers and stakeholders. Indie titles can give us things we never knew we wanted, and can appeal to people in small niches whose voices would be quickly drowned out when effort is spent trying to make a game that will appeal to the masses.
The mega-corps of the video game industry are already maximizing for widespread appeal/profits. Indie games are where we look to break free from that mold and explore something new and original.
Haha, I almost added a footnote explicitly excluding players/customers because this is way more of a grey area, but I didn't want to dilute the original message.
However, you're right. Player feedback is arguably even more important for indie devs than big-studio devs, since they're often operating on what feels fun versus operating on player data (especially from previous games, industry metrics, their own industry experience, etc) and getting that raw feedback of "is this actually fun?" is vital.
The big difference, however, is that the creators of indie games still have the "final say" on that game game. It's generally a Very Good Idea to listen to your players (and listen hard!), but it's rare that your studio will e.g. have its funding pulled if you _don't_ listen to them[0], unlike with (some) publishers and other stakeholders. That's a big difference IMO.
[0] With the obvious caveat of equating funding == sales when you try to release a bad game after not listening to players
> My opinion as someone actively working in the field is simple: an indie game is a game where the creator(s) of the game have full control over its vision.
Even if the mega-corp paying the dev team's salaries pinky promise to be hands off on creative decisions, the dev's themselves are going to be extreemly unlikely to do something that will piss off or threaten the mega-corp who pays their bills. That's why it's important that "indie" really means "independent"
Kickstarter, patron, tip jars, and any other form of support where internet randos throw money at something isn't really a problem because it doesn't stop them from making games free from the constraints imposed by mainstream video game industry.
> Even if the mega-corp paying the dev team's salaries pinky promise to be hands off on creative decisions, the dev's themselves are going to be extreemly unlikely to do something that will piss off or threaten the mega-corp who pays their bills. That's why it's important that "indie" really means "independent"
There are some publishers that I think have actually generally upheld that social contract to not interfere. There aren't a lot of them but they exist.
One that comes to mind is Annapurna. They pick up in development indie games, more or less write a blank check, and offer their advertising/name recognition. I'd still consider them indie personally because the games are all fundamentally indie developers that got lucky and got bankrolled but otherwise don't get interference.
Can't remember who said it, I think probably Rami Ismall? But I can't find the source. Something like: "If there is another person, company or entity that while not actually working on the game, can significantly change the course of that work - that is not an indie game".
Basically, indies should be in control of their own destiny. This seems like a very reasonable definition to me.
I kind of like this, however I do think that if EA funds a subsidiary or even just a team of developers making a game, that game shouldn't count as "indie" even if they promise to be 100% hands off.
Just accepting money from a major player in the video game industry is going to "change the course of that work". I prefer my indie developers to be, you know, independent.
One thing is a giant corporation „promising“ something - the other thing is reality where the promises of corporations are exactly worth nothing and you can bet on them breaking it as soon as it’s convenient.
We have multiple well known, well respected indie PUBLISHER'S now, like tinyBUILD and MicroProse (new) and even Humble Games, at least until Amazon milks the final few drops of value out of the Humble brand.
In a lot of cases the relationship is not that. Instead, the publisher takes a healthy cut of the revenue for doing all the things that isn’t directly developing the game: marketing, testing, release, sales, etc.
Oftentimes the publisher can act as an advisor or matchmaker for finding the right people to solve problems. But this is meaningfully different from taking control of the game’s development.
The real question about the Game Awards is how much more can they sell out before people stop caring. It has become an unholy cross between E3 and the Golden Globes. And by "Golden Globes" I mean the old school, pay-to-win Golden Globes, where suitcases full of cash were exchanged for votes.
This is the truth. I'm not sure where a reputable award would come from, or how to keep them honest, but it seems like an award coming from journalists will be doomed to fail thanks to corruption and lack of integrity. The incestuous nature of journalism, advertising, and industry makes it all but inevitable.
Here's a solution: just come up with a name that better describes the award category. Maybe that way different categories of games won't be lumped together to compete against each other.
The Independent category is antiquated, started in an era where it was quite obvious if a creative work was outside the normal pipeline. The Game Awards adopted this category the way it adopted many trappings from awards in other industries. However, there's so many ways to make and distribute games now that it's simply impossible to define this category without making it either highly controversial or effectively meaningless.
Let's stop trying to define what indie means and just retire it as a 20th century idea. Stop trying to be like the Oscars and go your own way.
Sorry, but "games that haven't shoveled sequels or a bunch of prior art" just doesn't have the same je ne ces quoi to me... Even then, sea of stars would still be considered largely derivative in style. Cocoon looked like a pretty novel game though.
I can’t tell how serious you’re being here or what you’re implying. This is a weird straw man. There have been excellent AAA and big budget games. If you’re saying you’d like a category for originality I’m sure there’s a way to put that, but that wasn’t the indie category either.
Indie is literally short for "independent". If it is financed and developed independently of outside influence, it is therefore indie. I think people conflate indie with low-budget. They are not the same. And I don't mean low-budget in a disparaging way. Low-budget has its perks, and can end up really cool.
TFA's example of Baldur's Gate 3 is a great example of this (though I'm not sure the degree to which Hasbro retained creative control; it almost certainly wasn't zero, so that's a point against it).
69 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadIs raising money via Kickstarter or Itch.io bankrolling themselves?
Pixel art and cuteness =/= indie.
Could also be 'don't do that because 8% of our target market wouldn't like it' during early development or in non public versions. Or silly image stuff like car manufacturers not allowing their licensed cars to show damage in racing games.
Last one is blatantly obvious, the first one, you'll never know about it because it was internal.
But I still move that makes BG 3 "not indie".
BG3 is indie because they financed the game with money they raised themselves and self-published. It's that simple.
Indie to me means a SMALL team (less than 20 total) selling something that is primarily a passion project, and not controlled by a larger entity. IE Minecraft stopped being indie when it was bought by Microsoft even though the team didn't get very large.
I'd love to hear a counterexample though.
BG3 is a rare example of a AAA indie game.
Certainly marketing and media (as evidenced by the article) find this useful, but I think many consumers also are more interested in the game than in the creators. So it makes sense that this language shift happens.
But yes it certainly misses the theoretical point of a category like that.
And would be nice if it was replaced with a technically correct word. ‘Indie-like’?
It seems like with every successful break from mainstream culture you'll see corporations attempting to capture the counterculture and homogenize it back into something they can control and sell back to the same people who tried to free themselves from those same corporations and the constraints they imposed in us in the first place.
Then again they are also one of the largest retailers of games in world...
So instead most people stick to a more loosely defined colloquial definition, rooted more in a film's budget and artistic aspirations, that often includes "indie-like" films from notable indie filmmakers, but financed directly by one of the major studios.
I suppose, but it rolls off the tongue way better than "not triple-A", which I think is in the ballpark of what most people are shooting for when they use "indie" to indicate an aesthetic or vibe.
The technical status of a game or developer as independent is very rarely relevant to me, except as a signal that they are more likely to produce games that exhibit the "indie" vibe.
My opinion as someone actively working in the field is simple: an indie game is a game where the creator(s) of the game have full control over its vision.
Funding is adjacent in that those who've funded are the most likely ones to be able to exert control over the finished product, but funding is the enabler, not the result.
As soon as the creator(s) of the game start to sacrifice their vision of the game in favor of stakeholder demands, it very quickly falls out of that "indie" category for me.
I don't think that's really true. Customers are stakeholders and listening to customer feedback and making changes even if they conflict with your initial vision can be a good thing!
To bring out the massively overused example in gaming: would you have had the Soulsbornes if they relied on customer feedback?
In the case of soulsbornes, it's death as a game mechanic and adding a bit more difficulty [1].
[1] ... although they mostly have the most fair difficulty i've seen in video games.
My example of the tutorial is just refuting your point using your example by showing that the mentioned genre studios do listen to customer feedback. Another one would be the beta they ran for the game in the first place.
Well, I'm pretty sure the games I enjoy and the spirit they were developed in is not compatible to just viewing them as a 'product'. So we're really talking about different things here.
When I think outside the commercial spheres its developers like increpare I think of… not From Software.
The mega-corps of the video game industry are already maximizing for widespread appeal/profits. Indie games are where we look to break free from that mold and explore something new and original.
However, you're right. Player feedback is arguably even more important for indie devs than big-studio devs, since they're often operating on what feels fun versus operating on player data (especially from previous games, industry metrics, their own industry experience, etc) and getting that raw feedback of "is this actually fun?" is vital.
The big difference, however, is that the creators of indie games still have the "final say" on that game game. It's generally a Very Good Idea to listen to your players (and listen hard!), but it's rare that your studio will e.g. have its funding pulled if you _don't_ listen to them[0], unlike with (some) publishers and other stakeholders. That's a big difference IMO.
[0] With the obvious caveat of equating funding == sales when you try to release a bad game after not listening to players
Even if the mega-corp paying the dev team's salaries pinky promise to be hands off on creative decisions, the dev's themselves are going to be extreemly unlikely to do something that will piss off or threaten the mega-corp who pays their bills. That's why it's important that "indie" really means "independent"
Kickstarter, patron, tip jars, and any other form of support where internet randos throw money at something isn't really a problem because it doesn't stop them from making games free from the constraints imposed by mainstream video game industry.
There are some publishers that I think have actually generally upheld that social contract to not interfere. There aren't a lot of them but they exist.
One that comes to mind is Annapurna. They pick up in development indie games, more or less write a blank check, and offer their advertising/name recognition. I'd still consider them indie personally because the games are all fundamentally indie developers that got lucky and got bankrolled but otherwise don't get interference.
Are Disney movies "indie"?
Why?
Once the company or parent is traded on public market they cease to be indie to me.
Basically, indies should be in control of their own destiny. This seems like a very reasonable definition to me.
Just accepting money from a major player in the video game industry is going to "change the course of that work". I prefer my indie developers to be, you know, independent.
Oftentimes the publisher can act as an advisor or matchmaker for finding the right people to solve problems. But this is meaningfully different from taking control of the game’s development.
Let's stop trying to define what indie means and just retire it as a 20th century idea. Stop trying to be like the Oscars and go your own way.
[edited to replace WotC with Hasbro]