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.
Pixel art and cuteness =/= indie.
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.
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’?