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Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

It depends on what you mean by "true" indie games. Valheim [1][2], by any reasonable interpretation of the word, is a completely indie game. It was made almost entirely by a single guy in his spare time after work, well at least until it blew up and he was able to expand the studio. And it was released with little more than a post on itch.io - 'Hey guys here's my game and a couple of pics. Let me know what you think.' And of course it did exceptionally well, because it's just a very good game.

In my opinion now is currently the absolute golden age for indie development of all sorts. But the catch is you actually need to make really good stuff. Just making a functioning game isn't really sufficient. There's even still a huge market for stuff that looks like it came from a 24 hour game-jam codeathon, but it needs to be fun. Check out Forager [3] for instance. As a warning, play that game for an hour - and you'll be playing it for 10 (or 100) because it's really just insanely fun.

And that's really all it is. The "problem" is that it's just become really (relatively) easy to make games. And so just making a functioning complete game is no longer any sort of real achievement. It needs to be fun. Make a game where people, with no connection or bias for you, will organically recommend it - and you're going to succeed.

[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/892970/Valheim/

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valheim#Development

[3] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/751780/Forager/

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> Make a game where people, with no connection or bias for you, will organically recommend it - and you're going to succeed

I.e. "make a fun game that has organic viral growth"

As if developers don't want to do that. You have not provided any information of value here.

Organic viral growth is extremely rare, and "fun" is a useless descriptor for someone trying to replicate "fun" in their own game. Why would developers want to make a game that isn't fun?

"build it and they will come" is almost always a lie, and the times it's not (I.e. organic viral growth) are not replicable.

If you're making something you have to solve for distribution. Just making the thing isn't enough for it to succeed.

> Why would developers want to make a game that isn't fun?

Of course nobody wants to make a game that isn't fun. But I know just how easy it is to get caught up into the "hustle" mentality where all you're focused on is getting the features complete. Once you're in this mindset, it becomes very easy to realize that your own game isn't even fun to you. This simple reminder is huge, should be repeated often, and is great advice.

Make a game that you would enjoy playing for hours on end, and you'll likely gather an audience of people that also enjoy it. It really is amazing at how easy it is to forget this and end up building a game that even you, the creator, don't enjoy playing very much.

Likewise, it's very easy to focus on small slices of gameplay and ignore the cohesiveness of the entire game. If different mechanics are super fun, but aren't fun together, you will have created a game that isn't fun.

I've seen enough games I have enjoyed for hours that remain a small (talking triple digits, at best) undiscovered niche to know that this is simply no longer true. Maybe it was true in 2016 when this article is posted, but not anymore.

Many games aren't fun, but many games are fun enough or are marketed well enough. You won't stand a chance without going above and beyond in one of the two executions.

> Why would developers want to make a game that isn't fun?

I mean, why do people want to write buggy software? It's not on purpose, they're just not good enough to deliver quality in a timely fashion.

My experience with most indie games cannot deliver on a core gameplay loop that's satisfying, even when that loop is not the draw of the game in which case I'd expect them to ape something competent.

IMO an example of a studio that doesn't mess this up is Giant Games. I've liked some titles more or less but the core gameplay loop has always been competently designed.

Right, so what does saying "[the game] needs to be fun" achieve? Absolutely nothing, because people who get it translate that into something useful like "make a satisfying core gameplay loop" and people who don't get it are still wondering what the hell "fun" means.

I'm criticizing the shallowness and lack of information in the comment. Everyone knows games should be fun. Saying "[the game] needs to be fun" has literally 0 bits of information and is a lazy explanation for why games don't succeed.

games are art, and art has a certain i don’t know what.

art has to risk failure or it’s not art. perhaps has to even be near certain to fail.

no one should be depending on art to feed their family.

no one should be making art for any reason other than love.

art must be beautiful.

as many have pointed out, blockbuster movies and triple a games are interesting, but they are not art.

Art is work, friend. I don't know if you've ever encountered an actual artist in your life, beyond someone making macaroni collages, but professionals in any craft can't afford to do what they do for love alone. Certainly not in game development, the most brutal, toxic and exploitative industry a creative can work in. Even Michaelangelo didn't paint the Sistene Chapel ceiling for free.

The big issue is that there is no consensus on "fun". You could make a "fun" platformer but you're not converting people who don't like paltformers (even if they make a few exceptions like Mario or Celeste. You're probably not making the next Mario, though). If the game is boring to that audience the solution shouldn't be to change genre. Not unless your goal is to attract a general audience.

So "the game isn't fun" needs a lot more context on who is saying it, and is useless otherwise. Do they like your genre? Are they miscommunicating what sounds like a game design issue when it could be an art/sound issue? Did they just grab your game in a bundle/gamepass and weren't really in the mood to play your game?

It's all speculation. And it's probably better to find better feedback than try to psycho-analyze every comment that way.

> "Why would developers want to make a game that isn't fun?"

Cognitive dissonance and inertia, among other reasons. When asked if the game (which this topic is about) was fun, the author beat around the bush. Even the positive reviews on Steam make it clear people didn't often really want to play the game more than once. The top review on Steam [1] is some guy talking about, "Had a LONG night of playing this yesterday with my mates..." with less than 2 hours played, lifetime.

The developer clearly knew, deep down, that the game wasn't really fun, but he convinced himself it was. And that's really really easy to do. This is one of the few things the mega-studios get right. They're more than happy to cancel big games they've already sunk millions into if they're just not working out right. As an indie developer you either have to have some crazy degree of introspection, or a few friends who understand that absolutely tearing down what you've spent thousands of hours on is the biggest favor they could ever do for you.

[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/342920/Toto_Temple_Deluxe...

As someone who has been working as an indie game dev for the past 13 years, I think you’ve got a pretty unrealistic view of the situation.

You can’t just make a “good game” anymore. The tastes of the market get more demanding over time. To put it another way, the bar for what constitutes a “good game” gets more and more difficult every year. There are successful games from a few years ago that would not get any sales if released today.

> The tastes of the market get more demanding over time.

That seems to me to be true of most (every) industries / areas of human endeavor?

It probably is, but because games are such a new medium, the rate it’s advancing (not just in terms of tech, but also in design and audience expectations) is quite rapid. It means if you work on a single game for a few years, by the time you release it the demands of the market may have changed dramatically.

But do they really? It's not the '80s/'90s, genres are somewhat fossilized by now. Some things do change, but they tend to be refinements of well-established concepts.

In fact, I'd argue that, having managed to kill the assumption that "newer game == more lifelike graphics" (possibly still valid for AAA, but only there), has dramatically lowered audience expectations in recent years.

Tech is only a small part of what I’m talking about. I mean more that the standards have risen significantly as far as the quality of art style and polish, and the sophistication of gameplay and metagame depth.

Could you name a few? Not trying to challenge I’m actually really curious how the bar has shifted over time. (It also makes me curious if it means newbies have an increasingly high bar to clear and eventually pushes out young people?)

Frankly most of them.

There are a dozen rogue-lite survival zombie games released on Steam every week. (Only a slight exaggeration).

Among us and Fall Guys are the definition of games that just happened to be at the right place at the right (and completely unpredecent) time. Among us especially was one that was released for years before it became viral. Party games are a whole is a hard genre to crack (especially on console) but COVID had people stuck and seeking such content

For a AAA example, Lawbreakers is probably one of the more recent stories. It was a game made by a director behind the acclaimed Gears of War (Epic's biggest series until Fortnite) thst was like Overwatch, but released a year after. Of course the game wasn't made in a year. But had it released 2 years earlier it might have been able to reach a bigger crowd rather than slowly fade into a niche cult following.

Anecdotal, but Lawbreakers wasn't nearly as good of a game in any respect. Saying that it might have succeeded if not for Overwatch might be true, but then you could also say that anything could succeed without any competition. Pong would still be #1 if not for everything that came out after it and was better than it.

> Saying that it might have succeeded if not for Overwatch might be true, but then you could also say that anything could succeed without any competition.

It wouldn't have zero competition in 2015, and I'm not talking about it coming out a decade prior, before Team Fortress 2. two years isn't even half a generation (or a quarter, in gen 8's eyes). I think your metaphor is a bit slanted here.

Also, I'm not saying Overwatch wouldn't have overtaken it anyway; But a year of being around would be enough to establish an audience and keep the game around. For a live service game this is key.

-----

>Pong would still be #1 if not for everything that came out after it and was better than it.

Sure, and pong was successful because it came before brickbreaker. Well, brick breaker is Lawbreakers in this case, the difference between cultural phenomenon and "but you HAVE heard of me" (which is an increasingly harder bar to clear).

And as a tangent, this is also why I'm never a fan of naming games in conversations. I don't think Overwatch is nearly as good a game as people think, it just got all that viral fan art and (previous) goodwill from a company gamers (previously) trusted. But there's some just world fallacy going on mentally in that I am inherently "wrong" when bashing a successful game and also inherently "wrong" when I praise a non-successful game. Because surely if a game fails it must have been bad right?

our perceptions are influence not just by quality, but by the zeitgeist around the games. Especially when we can't truly define why those games are "fun" to begin with.

You're describing survivorship bias. It's impossible for you to know about the great games that you haven't heard about. I'd suggest listening to the devs on this one. I can attest that 'the cream rises to the top' isn't remotely true in areas I know more about - short stories, movies, music. There is indeed lots of cream (in addition to lots more crap with money behind it) at the top. there's also lots of cream, vast gallons to stretch the metaphor, sinking always. Especially now perhaps, in our era of vastly greater content production and a well established arms race of advertising and marketing.

Can you point to some great movies that didn't see any success this year?

Which great games are pulling less than 1k steam sales? Or have just a handful of reviews? I've found some games I like with very low review count, but they're all clunky and whimsical, or extremely short, or can't be played without pestering the people you live with, or shoot themselves in the foot in other ways.

At some point the needle to hay ratio becomes untenable and searching the whole haystack is no longer possible for a single person. You can still randomly sample the stack, though, and rely on the opinions of others to find what you personally missed, and good games with mass appeal do tend to rise a little bit from random players stumbling across them; maybe not to blockbuster status or even profitability, but enough that a game with a marketing budget should get more than 21 Steam reviews if it's genuinely appealing. There's really not a lot of cream at the very bottom.

Why are 'you' (in the general sense, you're far from the only one doing this) implying this is an incomplete information game? Steam has absolutely excellent tools for content discovery, and the vast majority of people use them actively. And due to the effectively perpetual nature not only of Steam, but also even of console stores now a days - there really is no 'survivorship.' There are games released [literally] 30 years ago now being discovered by new users, and making new sales.

And that isn't just some sort of academic point I'm making. Seemingly the overwhelming majority of indie success stories are achieving long-tail success now a days. Increasing numbers of indie games released like a decade ago are having better play figures today than they did at launch. This includes both the extremely well known titles like Terraria [1], as well as those that are still relatively unknown like Kenshi [2].

[1] - https://steamcharts.com/app/105600

[2] - https://steamcharts.com/app/233860

Of course there are some successful indie games! But the only relevant thing is the probability that any one game will be successful. That chance is very small.

I don't see what the average would matter, because not all games are created equal. It's kind of like the Steven King / Richard Bachman experiment [1]. The question he was answering was not how likely a random author was to succeed, but how likely a good author was to succeed. So it seems that the important question is what are the odds of a genuinely good game going unrecognized, flopping completely? What are the odds of a Valheim failing? And I think that percent is extremely near zero.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bachman

I think the probability is quite high that even fairly good games will flop, because there are so many indie developers, and because the tools are so advanced. So only the best of the best will succeed, or those which satisfy some unique niche, or which somehow already have an established brand.

I agree with you and Keyle.

If you're correct, then this would mean there are countless genuinely great games on e.g. Steam going completely untouched that would otherwise be megahits if people simply knew about them. This sets up countless amazing commercial opportunities if you are correct, that are seemingly just going completely untapped. But for the more simplistic purposes of our discussion, can you think of any particularly compelling examples?

Basically I'm arguing that there is no black swan. It's not really hard to refute it, if I'm wrong, because all you need to do is point to one. I suppose the inevitable outcome might be we then hem and haw back and forth about whether something is "good", but well - at least it's a reasonable evidence based starting point, yeah?

If you pick the 10 largest apples out of 100 random apples, then those will, with high probability, be smaller than the 10 largest apples out of 1000 random apples. This should be dead obvious to anyone.

Among Us would be the most famous example of this.

The game was unknown for ~2 years (Released 2018, picked up ~2020) until it got picked up by streamers and was catapulted into the spotlight.

Why is it so hard to believe there are more games out there like this? These kind of markets are nowhere near efficient.

Among Us was released in November 2018, saw regular and rapid gains in users for nearly every month that it was released, and then went to the moon (briefly) after it became a streaming fad. I just don't think this is even an appropriate example?

Keep in mind the way that word of mouth works, it's about the percentages - not the userbase size. Your active userbase growing 30% a month doesn't look impressive when that translates to 3 new people, but so long as that 30% is reflective of organic word of mouth spread, that's going from 10 users to 5500 in a couple of years. Their userbase had increased by orders of magnitude before streamers came, and there's no reason to think it wouldn't not have continued to grow rapidly.

And that's one of the great things about games. People love to talk about them, share what they're playing, and also of course seek out those hidden gems. Players do this for fun, others like publishers do it with a big profit motive. If you think and can demonstrate that the market is nowhere near efficient, then you could be making a killing off of it.

[1] - https://steamcharts.com/app/945360

If you look at the Twitch viewership on the chart you can see that it led player count significantly even before the massive blow up. There's a 26k viewer spike in 2019 then consistently 2k+ viewers in 2020 before it went vertical.

Without content creators spotlighting it I highly doubt the game would have gone anywhere. The developers even say "we're really bad at marketing": https://www.kotaku.com.au/2020/09/among-us-improbable-rise-t....

The whole article is a goldmine: “We stuck with Among Us a lot longer than we probably should have from a pure business standpoint,” said Willard. “We tried to quit and should have quit several times.”.

It's clear they got lucky here. This kind of organic growth doesn't happen often, even with very good games.

> If you think and can demonstrate that the market is nowhere near efficient, then you could be making a killing off of it

The market being inefficient doesn't necessarily mean it's easy to exploit. A publisher is far better positioned than I am to "[make] a killing off of it".

I think you're taking about two different things: a game rising from a small number of players to a massive phenomenon, and a game getting that small number of players to begin with.

The HN analogy is a SaaS company struggling to become profitable vs struggling to find the first ten or hundred users. Profitability is very hard, finding a big enough niche is very hard, but...ten users?

Most indie devs would define "success" as "profitable". And those costs include personal labor. even if a single person made a fully open source video game, it's hard to ration that 10 people buying a $10 game made even over 6 months is "profitable". If only because Steam takes $100 to publish a game, and then 30% of revenue. You're down $30.

This is an overly literal exaggeration, but the example remains true even at a more realistic (and still pailtry) 100-200 sales. 1000 users is where it starts to maybe become a side hobby. Before then, You could be mowing lawns and make more revenue (without a 30% platform cut).

SteamCharts shows average online users playing a game, not sales. The multiplier to convert that to sales is going to vary [dramatically] by game, but it's going to be a very big number.

At 1000 users on SteamCharts you are making some very serious revenue, especially if you happen to be a solo dev.

I'd pick a different quote: "Each time an update landed, new players would try the game, and its overall player retention rate would tick ever upward. “That’s basically it,” said Willard. “We’re a slow-growing company. We snowball our way to the top instead of spike and tail like most Steam releases do."

I also think he may be being slightly coy there. Most games, especially indie, do spike and tail because they receive a bit of initial interest and new release type promotion, people try it, and move on. But what matters is not most games, but successful games. And there's an increasingly dramatic shift towards long-tail revenue. And there your games does spike, people try it, word of mouth happens, and then your real growth pattern starts. Reach a sufficient threshold and you get a big bump because you end up getting featured on Steam pages, and from there the sky's the limit.

Until someone can define "a good game developer", then I would rather poll a census than rely on a filter based on a sentiment no one can agree on.

>Forager

This is offtopic but the forager lead dev is often criticized for claiming to be a solo dev and taking credit for other people who worked on the game.

https://indiecator.org/2021/04/14/forager-the-rise-and-fall

Valheim and such games are very much exceptions to this, for every successful indie game released, there is an ocean of unsuccessful games out there and that may be equally as good, or even better than Valheim.

That said, procedurally generated games have a much harder time failing.

This is really not true.

I've literally never seen one that isn't doing well though

Can you fuel your argument with some examples? I hear the argument in similar forms a lot, how a lot of good games failed because of bad marketing or just no luck. But I never see any examples. The response I get to my question is usually "I don't know of an example precisely because it never got popular", but I find it very fallacious - if there's thousands of good games out there, that failed to be popular, surely you would stumble into a few of them. A claim that a game either is popular and makes money, or is not popular and no one ever hears about it - is a false dichotomy.

I have a one that immediately comes to mind:

Chicory, A Colorful Tale is way less successful than it should be. It’s a cross between a Zelda style game (upgrades, bosses, dungeons, exploration) with a coloring book (you color the world) with a deeply touching plot about impostor syndrome and the pressures of being labeled a talented artist. It has a huge number of accessibility features, co-op mode, an amazing ost, difficulty settings, runs like butter, and is all in all a super polished game. IMO this was GOTY shit and I don’t know why it didn’t take off.

I must admit it's a very good example, overwhelmingly positive on Steam with 1987 ratings, so it's hard to argue the game is bad.

If I compare Chicory, A Colorful Tale (A) to Stardew Valley B:

A: 97%/1987 B: 98%/483781 on Steam

A: 93.2%=2317 B: 97.33%=562`831 on Steam.db

I don't know where the disparity comes from, but those 4 % are significant. And here's something even more important:

A: 8 in game B: 36`293 in game

8/1987 = 0.4%, whereas 36`293/483781 = 7.5%! Stardew Valley, it seems, has 18.75× more replayability (which absolutely makes sense just based on genre).

Also price:

A: $14 to $20 B: $7.49 to $15

Shouldn't be surprising a game that is considerably cheaper, is more fun and provides that fun for an order of magnitude more time, sells better. It also was released earlier, so it got more sales from the "tail" sales, as well as it provided more value in the form of updates. In fact when I look now at the player count history, it's uneven, perhaps driven by updates, but the tendency is that it grows!

One more thought: maybe Stardew Valley makes for a better streaming content for some reason?

Perhaps Chicory deserves less sales than Stardew Valley, but still considerably more than it got? Maybe its good reviews come from the fact the game reaches the niche very well, it's clear what you do in the game (paint), but maybe this niche is just small?

I can admit I never heard about this game, despite its very high rating.

I wouldn’t compare Chicory with Stardew: for one, Stardew was genre-defining (as some people call things soulslikes, a whole heap of games are trying to capture Stardew). Replay ability of Stardew is part of its specific genre niche, where Chicory is again more like Zelda, in which replay ability isn’t a huge selling point to the game (although I find chicory just as fun as a Zelda to replay). Additionally stardew expanded multiple times throughout its development. I’m certain chicory’s devs would’ve done the same had it had it’s deserved attention at launch.

Now that I’m looking at my steam library I have some other games I think deserve more attention:

- Citizen Sleeper is not unlike Disco Elysium or a visual novel. But its mix of space opera and cyberpunk dystopia is extremely compelling. Excellent OST, and heartfelt characters. You get a real sense of the desperation and humanity of the impoverished, the undocumented, the refugee. The word building is deep and expansive (a sequel is coming, to not enough fanfare imo).

- Umarangi Generation is a photography game where you are playing as a propagandist during an ecologically-vibed apocalypse. You explore scenes of war, poverty, luxury, and terror, taking photographs all the while for the cause. The capacity to tell a deeply layered story with multiple political factions and economic groups merely through environment is stunning. The expansion is absolutely seething with anger.

Huh? Stardew is blatantly, ahem, "inspired by" the Harvest Moon series. It was mainly successful because it wasn't a Nintendo exclusive.

I know that, but most people compare such titles to Stardew and not harvest moon.

Yes. As you probably also know, "Harvest Moon" the name is no longer "Harvest Moon" th inspiration behind Stardew and many other crafting games. The actual devs behind it lost the rights to the name while "Harvest Moon" the IP devolved into generic crafting game #1243. The devs continued on under the new name (in the West) of "Story of Seasons"

That branding cost a lot of noteriety in the West.

I have no hidden agenda here, so I compared, I admit, peaches to oranges, Chicory to Stardew, just because Stardew was the first popular indie game I found to compare with. Feel free to choose a successful indie game within the same genre as the Chicory, and then we can try to analyze the differences again.

> Stardew was genre-defining

What is the argument here, that it was very good? That's exactly my point, it was very successful because of how good it was (rather than lucky).

My point is merely to counterpoint the claim that no one can cite specific good games that simply fall through the cracks of popularity even though on its merits they are quite excellent quality. Chicory is arguably in that category and then I followed up with a few more. If I wanted to lower my standards to stuff that I found charming but not deeply moving, I could name a few more after that.

Good indie games are ignored all the time. I tend to seek out indie games explicitly because I don’t have a huge attraction to most “triple a” style games (I dislike fps, sports, 4x, mmo, puzzle, and sex appeal. So I’m mostly limited to not-Witcher open word rpg. Platformers, roguelikes, metroidvanias, horror survival etc. tend to be indie.) So basically I’m usually stuck with “why doesn’t anyone scream about this game more”. Rain World was like that until Downpour came out, finally some fucking attention to it!

The sales:reviews ratio on Steam varies pretty hard, but tends to be around 60:1. That would leave Chicory selling in the hundreds of thousands of copies, and likely performing upwards of the 90th percentile. That's not especially neglected.

One thing you have to keep in mind is that we're all snowflakes to some degree. And so it can feel unfair when a game that really hits our preferences just doesn't receive as much attention as we think it deserves, but that may not necessarily be because people are unaware of the game, but simply because our preferences are not necessarily widely shared.

It's kind of like how in writing a Dan Brown is always going to be vastly more popular than an e.g. Dostoyevsky. It's simply that one author has much more mass appeal than the other. It can feel like a shame for fans of the latter, but it's the way society has always been and probably always will be.

CGA, trauma inducing palette doenst exactly scream wide audience accessibility. This game has a very strong and distinct art style.

I don’t know what CGA means in this case, but you don’t have to match colors if you’re concerned about colorblind ness. Distinct art styles are a standout in many extremely popular indie games (Cassette Beasts just came out with a ton of fanfare and distinct style, Cult of the Lamb is also a new indie game with distinct style, Cuphead if you want to go back a few years…)

It is objectively a good game yes, but you're glossing over how it also released with _extremely fortuitous_ timing for the type of game it is: a casual small-group-multiplayer survival exploration builder that leans more toward a lighthearted experience as opposed to the sweaty/hardcore experience which is/was the norm for these types of games.

Valheim dropped early 2021, just into the 2nd year of real COVID measures including lockdowns and an overall social atmosphere of "stay hunkered down at home and don't go anywhere". It was absolutely perfect timing, and I am 100% convinced it would not have done _nearly_ as well if it released 1 year earlier or 1 year later.

It's hard to make a shitty game successful without a AAA marketing budget sure, but it's also hard to make a good game successful without either a AAA marketing budget, or great luck/timing.

I think games like that, where it's a small team and they grow to great success from essentially just word of mouth, are very much lightning in a bottle. It's not just a case of good game design, it's the right kind of game for the time, and well as a fair amount of luck that the snowball starts rolling at the start. It is true that the conditions have more or less never been better for it to happen (arguably it was easier before the market was as saturated as it is now), it's just very rare for it to happen to any given game, even with good execution.

don't forget Rimworld. One guy making a huge and sprawling game that ignored the studio sensibilities and became hit (and a couple of memes).

Rimworld (and I'm sure Stardew will also be mentioned) came out years ago though; sure, the indie market was hopping back then too, but it's gotten worse since then.

> Rimworld [...] came out years ago though;

Rimworld was released in 2018, two years after the article was written (2016)

2013* It spent a long time in Early Access and was already a beloved game by the time 1.0 released.

That's a fair argument, I was one of the backers and I pretty much stopped playing the game (long) before it was released (still well spent money).

> that ignored the studio sensibilities

I mean, it's strongly 'inspired' by dwarf fortress, so any heterodox design credit mostly belongs there

design credit, absolutely! I'm speaking of Yayo and human leather hats, though. :D

Valheim is not an indie game, it is published by coffee stain studios. Now it is a small dev team, and they defiantly take the slow burn approach to development. Both common traits to independent developers. And good for coffee stain publishing to let them develop this way. But... I don't think I am being too pedantic in saying indie means independently published, and if you have a company publishing your title... you are not indie.

Indie is about whether some other company is controlling what you make. This means you can make an indie game even if it is published by another studio (like with Valheim).

None of coffee stain studios are AAA games.

I think there's a blurry line that separates indie games to non-indie games. Sure stardew valley is an indie game and God of War is not. But those are the extremes of the spectrum.

Is Hades an indie game? It is developed and published by Supergiant Games, but at this point is really well known and funded.

I think that definitely language has shifted a bit, and terminology that used to mean "artist that is unable or does not want to get a publishing contract" now means "small limited resource artist". I mean for gods sake there are "indie" publishing companies now. Which I regard as this amazing contradiction in terminology.

But yes, my pedantic side insists that if a large well funded game(or movie or song) uses the same legal entity to fund the game as was used to build it. They are independent and may fairly use the term "indie". Steam is a weird kink in the rules, because they are technically publishing all these games. But I hand wave that away by claiming that they are a market not a publisher(the difference being that a publisher takes on risk by paying you before the work is done).

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