The Game Awards raises an old question: What does indie mean?
engadget.com
engadget.com
Basically, indies should be in control of their own destiny. This seems like a very reasonable definition to me.
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.
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.
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.
Pixel art and cuteness =/= indie.
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.
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.
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.
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’?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
Are Disney movies "indie"?
Why?
Once the company or parent is traded on public market they cease to be indie to me.
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.
Then again they are also one of the largest retailers of games in world...
[edited to replace WotC with Hasbro]
Is raising money via Kickstarter or Itch.io bankrolling themselves?