Yeah. My issue was less with Dave the Diver being considered an indie at all and much more with its inclusion in the indie award category directly contradicting the description provided for the category
Yeah people are gonna split hairs over what should be in what category but if you're gonna give an award for it, you have to know like. What it actually means.
I really like Tyler Glaiel's definition of Indie. Focusing on the "independent" aspect, he says "a game is no longer indie if there is a person with the power to cancel or greatly change the direction of the game who is not on the development team". I'm sure some people can point to some edge cases for this, but I think for me that's a pretty satisfying definition of independent, because it focuses on the idea that the creatives involved are not being restricted by a larger publisher.
I'd like to add that they can still be indie if they have a publisher, if all they handled was things like distribution, sales and marketing. As long as they didn't have financial or creative control in how the game was made, I still consider that game indie. E.g. Bastion was published by Warner Bros. but the game was mostly finished before then and Supergiant just needed them for help getting Xbox live certification.
I don't like that definition because then Tencent would be considered Indie. They may have the power to do so but they are a largely hands off owner of gaming studios. They invest money and thats it. They almost never tell studios outside of china to do anything. Grinding Gear Games is owned by tencent but 2 of the founding owners still retain basically all rights to direct Path of Exile as they please. Is it still indie?
I'm reminded of something Strong Bad said once about "indie" films versus actual independent films: "they'll spend a 30 million dollar budget trying as hard as they can to make it look like they only spent a few hundred thousand."
My gold standard for "indie game" is the Original Cave Story. Entire game programmed, drawn, written, composed and self published by one developer. It's sort of like the definition of porn, it's hard to define but you know it when you see it.
If either of y'all think that Geoff makes any major decision regarding the nominees or voting process, you're seriously deluded. Keighley's GotY award ceremony is a popularity contest that is voted on by fans; he has ZERO say as to what titles get nominated and even less on which ones win. His biggest responsibility is organizing the event and booking the entertainment as well as the trailer slots. That's it. He's the host/producer, not some nefarious overlord bent on twisting the public's perception of what gaming is. If you want more "credible" awards ceremonies, might I suggest BAFTA, DiCE, and GDC. Those are chosen and voted on by devs.
What I got from a little research: Independant publication means you don't go through a big publisher's filter, nor through their editing process which might alter your product. Games like cave story are more doujin than indie (self published vs indepentantly published) but both terms are usually interchangeable. Tl:dr: an indie developer has full control over the project.
@@floppytokey I think that's a matter of structure, those are companies while the ones actually developing are divisions or subsidiaries of that company. Capcom for example has Divisions 1 and 2 and used to have Studio Clover as a subsidiary.
@@floppytokey No, because those companies are publishers themselves. An indie game is made by a developer that neither has a publisher to answer too nor is the dev a publisher for others. And crowdfunding does not count as having a publisher because those are considered donations.
The genre label issue is extra nonsense because several games have been actively trying to blur the lines deliberately in order to stand out. Everything has a bit of everything else now.
I'm imagining the Bobby Kotick crowd fighting scenario as the Jerry Springer bit from Austin Powers 2, but Bobby is essentially Dr. Evil in that scenario, and holding up the game awards trophy, shouting over the rioting crowd, "THE WORLD IS MINE!!!"
Just a reminder, Xenoblade Chronicles X lost "Best RPG" to the Witcher 3 Blood & Wine dlc expansion...but Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed isn't even being considered this year because "oh that's just DLC."
Reminds me of the Strongbad email about the difference between Independent and Indie. Once indie can be used as a selling point, the big guys come in and skew the definition.
*publicly traded Valve and Larian have shareholders and investors, but are not publicly bought and sold. Pretty much any company that isn't entirely self funded has shareholders of some description
"Indie" should have been limited to _"Not having any 'professional' Investors"_ ...Ie: loans that incur an interest rate which could yield an immediate return for the stakeholders. If there was residuals later on, that's different. *But the whole point* is not to have the type of development schedules and financial incentives that are obsessed with short term gains (IE: resulting in microtransactions)
That's crazy because we will never know that specific kind of information without telling the devs to make their finances public. The money *has* to come from somewhere. Investors are unavoidable.
@@iller3 Eh, hardly everyone. I'm not against more transparency from devs/companies in general. But the vast majority of gamers don't care how the sausage is made so long as they get their shiny new toy. After all, the mountain of scandals committed by Activision Blizzard certainly didn't stop Diablo 4 from making over $650 million in the first 5 days of its launch.
@@Valzahd ...and then its online presence (and user scores) immediately plummeted like a rock. That's not a sign of a satisfied customer base and their next releases will all suffer. Our 2 competing observations are not mutually exclusive
I thought Indie meant independently developed without influence from a major publishing house like Microsoft or Sony for example. Aka no corporate influence on a project
When Hellblade came out everyone touted the title "double A" game for it. Is that true for the future games in the series or what? I didn't realize Dave the Diver came from Nexon and it's insane to me that it got called indie with all that backing
Personal standard for Indie Game: - Original IP. Can't belong to a pre-existing intellectual property nor bound to a franchise. - Self-published. Hasn't had to go through publishers to gain its funding nor to be released. - Self-funded or Crowdfunded. Has gained most of its funding through crowdfunding or by the developer's own budgeting means. IE: No other companies have "pitched in", or contributed significant amounts of money to the game's budget.
As soon as a dev works with another company for financial backing/other help they are no longer indie. Your game could cost $5 but if it has a publisher other than yourself it is a title released under that publisher and no longer an indie title. People use the word indie to describe lower budget games/media. Indie is independent for a reason ya know. It doesn't use or rely on another company for money/production/other. Crowdfunding isn't 3rd party because the money itself doesn't come from a company.
@@timlerch7425 And? That's still definitely not enough time to get out of the honeymoon period. It's called the Game Awards; not the Recency Bias Awards.
I think the biggest thing that took meaning away from the term is when publishers like Devolver Digital popped up and "partnered" with what would have been small indie teams. Because for me personally. . . indie should mean self-published (as "part" of the criteria). But now it seems to only mean "not OWNED by an external publisher"/"the team is not a subsidiary of a greater company". Scale threshold is a bit arbitrary when trying to relate it to budget or team-size. Can it still be indie if the team who made it is considered "established" in that they have already put out like 20 other super successful games? If you ever put out a tweet saying "now hiring", is that when it stops being considered indie??? By that, I mean you choose to start growing your team/LLC by hiring random devs off of a job listing.
@@Bourikii2992 So if you "partner" with devolver digital but are only made of 5 people, you are fine? What if you are 2 people and get AQUIRED by someone like Gearbox publishing? What if you are just a stand-alone studio of only 25 people? What if it's 100 people but a large percent of them do backend stuff like branding or is just a voice actor or Folly Artist (person who does sound effects)? The alternative being people who do texture work, animation, level design, 3D modeling, terrain and other assets, ect. There are alot of variables to question on "does this have any impact on the previous definition".
@@Hadeks_Marow "Partnered" sounds a hell of a lot like you have a publisher. If you're bought out by gearbox you now are just part of gearbox. You also get way, way more funding than indie developers usually get. 25 employees? Well the average game developer makes 116,000 a year lol. But let's reduce that to 70,000 because you're a small company of 25 people. That company is spending 1.75 million on just employees. That's an indie company to you?
@@Bourikii2992 Yes. Scale should be irrelevant to whether a company is independent or not. You're not going off of an actual definition, you're just going off of what feels right to you.
@@Bourikii2992You didn't exactly answer the first question. You referenced it, but didn't actually answer it, or at least, you weren't direct about answering it and left the answer kinda vague.
i feel like if we are going to continue to use "indie" to describe things it need to be based on the pretty cut-and-cry dictionary definition, and not on vibes we don't need to water the term down to uselessness like music did, indie shouldn't be an 'aesthetic' now if folks are dead-set on using a catch-all term we need a new one, one that is more broad and not already an existing term
It's funny that we try to categorize everything to make sense of them in the same way that we categorize movies by genre. Are there cowboys? Western. Are they making out? Romantic Western. But with games you throw mechanics into the mix where you can have as much or as little of any mechanic as you like while still trying to innovate and come up with your own. How many roads must one travel to become a man? How many platforms must one jump to be a platformer?
Brought this up with a friend and they shared their personal definition: "Is company leadership still part of the active creation of game assets" I think I can stand by this one with the addition of "company leadership doesnt accept external corporate funding"
McDonalds, TacoBell and Walmart started as mom and pop until they franchised. Saying that things cannot change so we shouldn't label things so they never change is the most Canadian thing I've heard these morons say. A company can start out as indie, gain success and become a major company. Things DO change.
They didn't fuckin say shit about things cannot change. They're literally saying things DO change. Not just individual teams and companies, but how the industry works at large. And yet despite a thing changing people STILL call it indie, despite no LONGER being small or LITERALLY NOT INDEPENDENT. That's a big part of what they're even SAYING here. You fucking moron.
Yep, there's 2 examples in the arpg genre that both would consider started as indie and are no longer indie despite their GIGANTIC size difference. Blizzard and Grinding Gear games. GGG is 120 people. Blizzard is thousands. Neither are indie but both were started that way.
I look at the term Indie the same way I look at souls-like. It's a checklist of items and more boxes you check the more confident I am in applying it. My list for indie would include small team size, small budget, low processing requirement, older graphic style, smaller overall size, and a willingness to take chances on things the bean counters at major publishers would veto because it might make less money. A game might have some of these things but not be an indie. Also, on team size and budget specifically, I would define it as relatively small compared to the big companies like Nintendo, Microsoft and so on.
Gamefreak seems to be a good test for this discussion. No one would call Pokemon indie games, and yet pretty much any non pokemon related project they put it out has that same small indie taste to it. Harmoknight, Little Town Hero, Tembo the Badass Elephant...are they indies if they are attached to the same studio that launched an empire across multimedia?
Gamefreak is just totally incompetent and can't actually produce a Pokemon game without the direct help of a shitload of nintendo heavy hitters, hence why The Pokemon Company was created fuckin Satoru Iwata was responsible for the vast majority of its success
Martin Scorsese very recently actually said he doesn’t like using “indie films” because it categories them and pigeonholes them to much That exact same reasoning he gave can be shoved right back at the games industry/award shows. Like really come the fuck on how stupid can the game awards be?
We're all Indies if you think about it for Mom and Pop stores the laws have that covered lol unlike video game genres a small business actually has written requirements that it needs to meet or not exceed
I think there was a MASHED cartoon about this, though that was talking about how genre distinctions don't really work for distinguishing indies from major releases. Braid and Mario both as "jump on the guys and save your girlfriend" games were the example. LIMBO was there for some reason.
the reason things have nonsense definitions is because Gamers can't read, this is also why the vast majority of Gamers absolutely cannot stand turn-based rpgs Same thing goes for movies, the average moviegoer just wants to see some more sex and some more violence they don't care about the craft.
I do hope this little controversy motivates the TGAs to break away from the indie word and instead just include them alongside the big budget games. Baldurs Gate being an indie game by the basic Film definition just destroys everything and the word just needs to be discarded.
If they do that what will just happen is that they will be not included at all and only AAA games will show up. At the end of the day it's just semantics, you can't really define like a RPG game either.
@@Wandersnatch.I mean... RPG might indeed be hard to define, but a lot of the genre flexibility there too is because of some hot clown shoes takes being given ANY leeway. There's also a bit of historical blame there on Sega too who decided in the 90's that RPG meant "fantasy world games" before IMMEDIATELY making a bunch of sci-fi games and keeping the moniker. If you've ever heard someone try to argue Legend of Zelda is an RPG, because "the heart containers are sorts like leveling", this is the ACTUAL reason why. They're parroting ideas being echoed from another culture by people that didn't understand the original bad context and retroactively justifying it.
I always thought "indie" was a label to put on smaller games from smaller teams that were extremely good but not a lot of people played. Sort of like how we use cult classic for movies. I think the difference between a cult classic and an indie game is that cult classic's are like cruelty squad, or golden light, really unique and unconventional, where as an indie manages to have that polished feel to gameplay and takes a well known mechanic or idea and builds an incredible experience. So like for me and indie means a game that plays well, has a shocking amount of content for it's budget, and often sacrifices graphical fidelity for gameplay. A cult classic game is a game that will never see a game awards show but are incredibly rich with creativity and will usually have mechanics that you'd never think to put in a similar game, like how you eat your weapons for buffs in golden light, or the way the implants work in cruelty squad, or in wrought flesh how you swap out your organs, and usually the art style is meant to be weird and not a sacrifice due to budget. and then a AAA experience should mean you don't sacrifice gameplay and graphics are usually attempting to be photo real at the cost of needing to appeal to a broader audience, and often shoehorns in more traditional mechanics as to not alienate anyone, like a skinner box leveling system or accessability options. AA would mean a game that has all the same restrictions as AAA but usually a more unique story or aesthetic.
Talking about security at the events. I will be more amused if someone who they let on stage decide to scrap. Like there is a game, it got super popular, they got a hold of the guy and it was all a plan to give Todd Howard a wedgie for liking chess or something.
Favorite indie game this year for me BattleBit Remastered and that was a game made by 3 people. It’s so hard to decide if a team of 50 is still a indie if there’re funded for years on a game without any trouble financially. It’s a confusing mess
No publisher and small studio probably no more than 5-10 employees and a budget of probably less than 1 million dollars. Apparently only top 5% make over 1 million dollars in sales. No that French restaurant is not a mom and pop shop anymore. It's a a very large business at this point. I'd say mom and pop is a singular business created by a local. Brick and mortar is a larger business that might be franchised out to multiple people and at 15 stores I'd say that's out of the scope for both.
If a game is developed and published by the same small company it's likely an Indie. If the company has publicly traded stock it's disqualified. Indie games don't exploit customers with microtransactions. You know a game isn't Indie when there's tons of bad publicity about monetization updates bilking the player base, yet there's still enough fools and whales to keep them afloat. When a game franchise has become too big to fail from fools and whales it's far from Indie.
Who in their right fucking mind would think Baldur's Gate 3 is an indie game? It's *literally* an official D&D vidya, one of the most popular tabletop RPG's on the planet, it is the farthest possible from being indie.
The Creators are at the reigns of their own project. No parent companies. No investors. The game genres are not that ambiguous. Maybe you think by mudding the waters it will stop comparisons and give weaker titles a chance. Games have stood and competed in their respective genres for years. The exception doesn't disprove the rule. The genre definitions only look lose meaning when multiple examples are present. We have already seen the big corps try to ape indie games and they got called out then we moved on.
Technotise is definately an indie film since it was written directed and animated by like 4 people in an apartment. Also qualifies for the comic since it was self published
To the whole "indie's must be self-published" thing, it just reminded me of Petal Crash, a game published by Galaxytrail, an indie dev studio. So under the original definition, Freedom Planet 2 would be indie, but Petal Crash wouldn't, despite having a lower budget and development time than FP2 and the publisher being very small scale?
As a guy who is playing 2 very long beta games in mount and blade 2 just came officially and project zomboid indie companies are getting harder to detect for goty
No, it's a chain - franchise, i'm pretty sure, is when any jackass can go "hey, i want to open a [store name] at [location]" and go through a process, get approved, and then open that store in that place.
It wouldn't be a franchise, it would just be a company/LLC at that point. A franchise is a very specific thing in which the store is *owned* by locals, but they use the licenses of a larger corporate entity so that they can use their name, recipes, and supply lines. E.G. Walmart and Walgreens stores are not franchises, as they are owned by corporate middle manager suits who belong to a larger company, but McDonalds and Subways are because they get a small portion of the revenue and leave their employees to it.
man, can't wait for Zelda to win the Indie award, it totally got it in the bag, ha! This reminds me of that idiot that kept trying to explain that Spiderman was a RPG because it had levels and skill trees or something stupid like that.
Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop is a game on Steam that is based on Alien Swarm, the Valve game from 2010, which is based on Alien Swarm, the Black Cat Games mod of Unreal Tournament 2004 from 2004. Is Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop an indie game? If I made a mod of Half-Life 2 called "this is just all of Half-Life 2 with a different title", would that be an indie game? Was the 2004 release of Alien Swarm an indie game?
I don’t think we should totally scrap the genre indie. It’s now existed for years so regardless, it’s always going to exist. We need a genre that showcases independent developers. Ultimately we have to hold people that use the genre definition wrongfully, accountable.
My understanding is: RPG with many systems that can affect the environment and let you mess with how you handle missions. You'll also always get a person who talks about "emergent gameplay". The freedom you have to complete a task however you want is meant to lend to the idea of being an "immersive" experience.
“Immersive Sim” is a design philosophy, not a genre. Please consider looking up the article with this precise title on Google. It's really worth a read. I really wish more big gaming channels decided to broadcast this notion, because limiting to defining it a mere genre is a huge disservice to game creation in general.
I think they can vibe check with best indie all they want since they at least added "best debut indie game", which is less of one. Most of their other categories are also vibe checks and have been since the beginning anyway. Otherwise, I feel like "best indie" is always going to be kind of terrible anyway. What people want is some up-and-comer to win it, but what would actually happen is some well-known "indie" dev would eat up a nomination slot any year they put something out same as any other category with big budget games. They should have also had "Best Original Title" though for bigger budget stuff, to complement "best debut indie". Needs to be one catch-all category that can't include RE4 Remake, BG3, Alan Wake, Spiderman, etc. Is your game a remake? Can't win it. Is your game something that exists within a larger series? Can't win it. Is your game based on popular IP in any way? Can't win it.
"Modern retro" is a horrible term overall. It just pigeonholes valid and diverse art styles into a very narrow slice of the 20th century instead of something that can be built upon to generate new and vibrant art. As if all games through the 80's and 90's weren't greatly distinguishable from one another...
Here is one thing I don't think people are considering. There are 2 different "indie" terms. There is "indie" the "game-genre" and then there is "indie" the developmental "classification". Developmental background tends to not be related to the classification of gameplay (which is what "genre" is supposed to be used for). The problem is, despite these 2 terms using the same word. . . their definitions don't necessarily have to align with eachother. I think we need to come up with an alternative term for "indie" the "game-genre", which is probably what TGA is considering as to what to do for next year.
@@MattManDX1 Name me one side-scroller game that isn't from nintendo that people would not describe as having indie-vibes (genre, not developement). Cause i could see people wanting to call ori and hollow knight "indie games". And just going with "indie-vibes" would not prevent the underlying issue of it just coming off as insulting to independent studios who were actually nominated. I made the original request cause some games with indie-vibes can be considered large-scale. Where the only thing that defines it half the time is the visuals. Like if it has a low-poly art style.
@@Hadeks_Marow That's the main problem I think, people calling "Indie" a genre when the term is meant to be used as a financial descriptor. We just need to replace it with an actual name for the genre, like "Retro-Inspired" or "Small-Scope"
@@MattManDX1You can't deny tho that a "genre" has sprung due from the terms existence. So I don't necessarily agree with you on that the problem is that people use "indie" as a genre, so much as the problem just being that they used "that term" to name the genre by. I know that's what you might have meant to say, but I'm just wanting to make the wording of the problem match up with the meaning as to not leave any loose ends. R.I.S.S. I like the name, but are we sure that fully covers every title that would fall in this genre?
What is independent? If you partner with a publisher like Devolver Digital but are not owned by them and are a dev team of like, 2 to 5 people, are you no longer independent? If you got your funding through kickstarter, are you independent or did depend on the crowdsourcing of the internet?
@@Hadeks_Marow If you partner with a Publisher, but you still own your own IP and Studio, you are independent. Therefore Indie. If you are owned, you are not independent.
@@TheProphessionalGeek But are you not depending on the publishers support? This is what I mean when I question your original wording. What definition do you give the english term of "independent". Cause by most, it means "do it by yourself" without relying on outside aid. It's only "not complicated" when you don't define the exacts. And as the video brought up. That would make Balders Gate and Fortnite "indie games" as well. They are owned by the people who makes them. And no, epic games does not have a parent company. It is own by Tim with over 50% of the stock, meaning the controlling interest, which means he's incharge. So perhaps there's a caveat of "independent except if you are getting outside aid. . . also your company/group has to be privately owned/not on the stock market. . . you know, and any extra rules needed to rule out the bigger fish as needed".
Destiny 2 was technically self-published following the split with Activision. Edit: I wrote this comment before i heard Pat and Woolie give the example of Baldur's Gate 3 being self-published.
So you would consider Baldur's Gate 3 Indie? They handled most of the Budget themselves from my understanding. Edit: Ok, I continued the cycle unintentionally.
It's absolutely crazy that some people don't consider big budget indie games as indie simply because of the scope of the game. Or because they have "x number of employees" over a made up number in your head that disqualifies it from being an independent game.
I guess the only deviation begs the question of wether those developers would still be considered "underdogs" in the market then. At least, that's part of what I assumed the point of being called "indie" was. That you're going up against juggernauts in the industry and might have a smaller audience that knows about you.
One issue is, if you put out +20 SUPER successful games prior, does that not make you a very established company? If you are an established company, are you still indie? So then does that mean first party titles are indie? If you have more than one team, are you still indie? What if you are not owned by anyone, are self published but have a HUGE networth as a company? What if the company is privately owned?
i say if the team is under 20 people, the company is private and they're the only people working there, and the game is self-published, the piece of media is indie. i think that's the common sense definition. for instance, hi fi rush and bomb rush cyberfunk have sort of a similar aesthetic going on, but hi fi rush is not an indie game, and bomb rush cyberfunk is
so like, if jeff bezos were to retire from all other work tomorrow and make and publish a game by himself that would be an indie game even though he's got more money than some cities probably lol. them's the rules
What about bull examples can we think of? Is pokemon an indie game if gamefreak has notoriously small dev team? Is Slay the Spire NOT an indie game if it was published by the Humble Bundle corp?
every time i think on this topic on geoff game fun times awards is among us winning in 2020 even though it came out in 2018 and only got popular in 2020 the awards mean nothing im there for the cringe and game announcement
here's the truth about definitions, realty doesn't care for them. For example, what's the difference between a hardcore game vs a casual game? There isn't one, if you play Animal Crossing for 800 hours that's not casual play that's insane. Same with genres, what makes an RPG? role-playing, leveling, characters, story? Who knows! because reality is messy.
Reality DOES care for them though. "Hardcore" and "Casual" aren't definitions, they're just vague tone descriptors. You can be subjectively correct if you consider Animal Crossing to be a hardcore game, you'd be objectively incorrect if you considered Animal Crossing to be a first person shooter.
Hmm, if I were to define an "independent" game studio/developer in the modern era, it would be an entity that is not owned (or majority financed) by, nor itself owns, any other game dev/publishing entities (unsure about non-game related entities). I'm less concerned about who publishes the games, as long as they're not notably involved in the actual production of the game (or outright own/hired the developer). Probably still a lot of edge cases to work out, but I think it addresses the fundamental concern of what it means to be "indie", to me anyway 🤷
I remember a guy got really mad at me for calling french comics indie years ago because people who can read the language don't consider them indie I guess
I just meant it by the fact that 75% of foreign comics aren't translated or are so ridiculously expensive that besides tintin and asterix noone really knows about those comics. I mean, you never see woolie referencing french comics on here
So if a Spider-Man comic released in English doesn't get translated into French for some reason does that mean Spider-Man is now an indie comic from French people's perspective?
@@MattManDX1 lol I have no idea the people on readcomiconline and disqus are insane and just argued just to argue. its the kinda site where if you say a hot take you're called a liberal
all I know is that the game I'm trying to make is truly an indie. alone like a bad dog, no cash and being made in a rotten potato pc that shouldn't even work by 2000's standars (2gb of ram is pain) lol
People call dark souls an indie game to this day to which I reply, just because it looks and plays like outdated garbage doesn't mean it's a indie game.
I still think it should be self publish based. Sure, Baldur's Gate and Fortnite would be considered indie. But with this definition of indie you onow that the game wasn't beholden to a third party company when it was made. Look at it like Star Wars. the biggest indie movie series....until Dinsey bought it. Then it stopped being indie.
Baldur's Gate is beholden to Wizards of the Coast though since they own the D&D ip, automatically disqualifying the game as an indie title. Fortnite is made by Epic Games, who are themselves publishers. You cannot be an indie developer and a publisher at the same time, that's like calling yourself a vegan carnivore.
@@Deminese2 But they can't make Baldur's Gate 4 without asking for permission, which prevents it from being an independent game. Their own Divinity: Original Sin series are indie games though.
An "indie game" is any game I like for which I can plausibly use the title "indie game" to deflect criticism of it. "Look, bro, you need to support indie games, so just buy it already."
I think the only proof you need that the game industry has no idea what the fuck it's doing with genre names is that an alternate name for "Metroidvania" was only codified within the last decade, and barely anyone uses it.
In this video, Pat and Woolie ignore the possibility that a single definition can have more than one quailifier for exactly twenty-one minutes and thirty seconds 🙂 > It can't be funding because x > Well it can't be team size because y > But it can't be self publishing because z > Then what could it be???
I’m pretty sure that’s the point. Eventually with enough modifiers, the scope becomes so narrow that most games that are often seen as indie are not, and the fact we need such a specific definition makes the point of the genre useless. Dave the Diver is a smaller project by a smaller team, but it has a lot of security. If we make it too specific, then now a ton of other games that now have no such label and leave it all up in the air
What I want to know is along what terms should we categorize video games? Because the term "Role Playing Game" is so loaded and vague that literally any game I think of I can find a way to define it as a RPG. I know what its "intended" to be used for but the borders of that are as obscured as Silent Hill. Which would technically qualify as a RPG!
@@music79075 If you want to go there yeah. Most people get hung up on the witcher for the player having control of the narrative. The first thing they go to is the "role" in a story. If you truly have a say in the story of NBA 2k then yeah.
@@music79075 how much is fallout like the Witcher? I like to tie it to the character sheet. I think it's good to have one role or the other since people are so hung up on character roles. Which isn't that widely used(Bethesda, bioware, witcher). For decades we played roleplaying games without being able to affect the story.
![Seungmin "그렇게, 천천히, 우리(As we are)" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kAzmhLHePqU/mqdefault.jpg)
Everybody can have their own definition of an "indie" but importantly, Keighley needs to put out a definition for HIS AWARD.
The Keighley Award: Reserved for Hideo Kojima every year
Yeah. My issue was less with Dave the Diver being considered an indie at all and much more with its inclusion in the indie award category directly contradicting the description provided for the category
Yeah people are gonna split hairs over what should be in what category but if you're gonna give an award for it, you have to know like. What it actually means.
I really like Tyler Glaiel's definition of Indie. Focusing on the "independent" aspect, he says "a game is no longer indie if there is a person with the power to cancel or greatly change the direction of the game who is not on the development team". I'm sure some people can point to some edge cases for this, but I think for me that's a pretty satisfying definition of independent, because it focuses on the idea that the creatives involved are not being restricted by a larger publisher.
I agree
I'd like to add that they can still be indie if they have a publisher, if all they handled was things like distribution, sales and marketing. As long as they didn't have financial or creative control in how the game was made, I still consider that game indie. E.g. Bastion was published by Warner Bros. but the game was mostly finished before then and Supergiant just needed them for help getting Xbox live certification.
That definitely covers a lot of the ground work for the definition, absolutely.
I don't like that definition because then Tencent would be considered Indie. They may have the power to do so but they are a largely hands off owner of gaming studios. They invest money and thats it. They almost never tell studios outside of china to do anything. Grinding Gear Games is owned by tencent but 2 of the founding owners still retain basically all rights to direct Path of Exile as they please. Is it still indie?
@@Deminese2He said the power to change, not the inclination. Tencent has the capability, should they care to.
I'm reminded of something Strong Bad said once about "indie" films versus actual independent films: "they'll spend a 30 million dollar budget trying as hard as they can to make it look like they only spent a few hundred thousand."
This situation is the exact reason the term "Arthouse" exists for movies
I very much consider games coming from Annapurna Interactive to be "Arthouse"
Putting things in boxes is a human instinct, like cats and boxes
My gold standard for "indie game" is the Original Cave Story. Entire game programmed, drawn, written, composed and self published by one developer. It's sort of like the definition of porn, it's hard to define but you know it when you see it.
Oh yeah Cave Story and Axiom Verge are the pinnacle of Indie
Binding of Isaac for me. The old Flash version in particular.
In the category of "insane amounts of work done by one person," Stardew Valley comes to mind
Geoff Keighley the type to give Destiny 2 Best Indie Game because it was self published for a while
It's incredible how the Dorito Pope still manages to find ways to destroy any and all credibility he has in the industry. Truly a pioneer.
@@felixdaniels37It’s always fun to go into RUclips comments to see people rewriting reality.
If either of y'all think that Geoff makes any major decision regarding the nominees or voting process, you're seriously deluded. Keighley's GotY award ceremony is a popularity contest that is voted on by fans; he has ZERO say as to what titles get nominated and even less on which ones win. His biggest responsibility is organizing the event and booking the entertainment as well as the trailer slots. That's it. He's the host/producer, not some nefarious overlord bent on twisting the public's perception of what gaming is.
If you want more "credible" awards ceremonies, might I suggest BAFTA, DiCE, and GDC. Those are chosen and voted on by devs.
"Whoever can put up this ladder and grab the belt wins game of the year."
Indie is when the Workers own what they produce. If the Team, no matter the size or budget, Has full autonomy behind the scenes that is Indie.
What I got from a little research:
Independant publication means you don't go through a big publisher's filter, nor through their editing process which might alter your product.
Games like cave story are more doujin than indie (self published vs indepentantly published) but both terms are usually interchangeable.
Tl:dr: an indie developer has full control over the project.
that's even dumber, because by that logic every atlus, nintendo, and capcom game is indie, or am i wrong
@@floppytokey I think that's a matter of structure, those are companies while the ones actually developing are divisions or subsidiaries of that company.
Capcom for example has Divisions 1 and 2 and used to have Studio Clover as a subsidiary.
@@floppytokey No, because those companies are publishers themselves.
An indie game is made by a developer that neither has a publisher to answer too nor is the dev a publisher for others. And crowdfunding does not count as having a publisher because those are considered donations.
The genre label issue is extra nonsense because several games have been actively trying to blur the lines deliberately in order to stand out. Everything has a bit of everything else now.
Honesty, I’d like to see a self published category that spotlights the smaller titles most people overlook.
I'm imagining the Bobby Kotick crowd fighting scenario as the Jerry Springer bit from Austin Powers 2, but Bobby is essentially Dr. Evil in that scenario, and holding up the game awards trophy, shouting over the rioting crowd, "THE WORLD IS MINE!!!"
Just a reminder, Xenoblade Chronicles X lost "Best RPG" to the Witcher 3 Blood & Wine dlc expansion...but Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Future Redeemed isn't even being considered this year because "oh that's just DLC."
Actually, Cyberpunk's Expansion DLC is being nominated this year, so I don't think DLC is in the topic at all. It just got ignored or something.
More people probably played Witcher DLC than ever owned a Wii U, so...
Reminds me of the Strongbad email about the difference between Independent and Indie. Once indie can be used as a selling point, the big guys come in and skew the definition.
Can't say what an indie is, but I can say what it isn't: anything made by a company with shareholders.
*publicly traded
Valve and Larian have shareholders and investors, but are not publicly bought and sold. Pretty much any company that isn't entirely self funded has shareholders of some description
"Indie" should have been limited to _"Not having any 'professional' Investors"_ ...Ie: loans that incur an interest rate which could yield an immediate return for the stakeholders. If there was residuals later on, that's different. *But the whole point* is not to have the type of development schedules and financial incentives that are obsessed with short term gains (IE: resulting in microtransactions)
That's crazy because we will never know that specific kind of information without telling the devs to make their finances public. The money *has* to come from somewhere. Investors are unavoidable.
@@1wayroad935 you say that like it's a *_bad_* Proposition instead of exactly the kind of Transparency that everyone's been clamoring for
@@iller3 I'm saying that's crazy because it's never going to happen.
@@iller3 Eh, hardly everyone. I'm not against more transparency from devs/companies in general. But the vast majority of gamers don't care how the sausage is made so long as they get their shiny new toy.
After all, the mountain of scandals committed by Activision Blizzard certainly didn't stop Diablo 4 from making over $650 million in the first 5 days of its launch.
@@Valzahd ...and then its online presence (and user scores) immediately plummeted like a rock. That's not a sign of a satisfied customer base and their next releases will all suffer. Our 2 competing observations are not mutually exclusive
I thought Indie meant independently developed without influence from a major publishing house like Microsoft or Sony for example. Aka no corporate influence on a project
When Hellblade came out everyone touted the title "double A" game for it. Is that true for the future games in the series or what?
I didn't realize Dave the Diver came from Nexon and it's insane to me that it got called indie with all that backing
Personal standard for Indie Game:
- Original IP. Can't belong to a pre-existing intellectual property nor bound to a franchise.
- Self-published. Hasn't had to go through publishers to gain its funding nor to be released.
- Self-funded or Crowdfunded. Has gained most of its funding through crowdfunding or by the developer's own budgeting means. IE: No other companies have "pitched in", or contributed significant amounts of money to the game's budget.
So everything Mihoyo has made is an Indie Game since it was all in-house?
@@1wayroad935 Sure.
As soon as a dev works with another company for financial backing/other help they are no longer indie. Your game could cost $5 but if it has a publisher other than yourself it is a title released under that publisher and no longer an indie title. People use the word indie to describe lower budget games/media. Indie is independent for a reason ya know. It doesn't use or rely on another company for money/production/other. Crowdfunding isn't 3rd party because the money itself doesn't come from a company.
Geoff Keighley would absolutely nominate an unreleased title for game of the year because it will release a day before the ceremony.
That sorta happened already. PUBG was nominated for GOTY while it was still in beta
God of War 2018 was nominated for Award mere days after it came out... which means the actual nomination had to happen BEFORE it was released.
@@DairunCatesearly review copies, dude.
@@timlerch7425 And? That's still definitely not enough time to get out of the honeymoon period. It's called the Game Awards; not the Recency Bias Awards.
I think the biggest thing that took meaning away from the term is when publishers like Devolver Digital popped up and "partnered" with what would have been small indie teams. Because for me personally. . . indie should mean self-published (as "part" of the criteria). But now it seems to only mean "not OWNED by an external publisher"/"the team is not a subsidiary of a greater company".
Scale threshold is a bit arbitrary when trying to relate it to budget or team-size. Can it still be indie if the team who made it is considered "established" in that they have already put out like 20 other super successful games? If you ever put out a tweet saying "now hiring", is that when it stops being considered indie??? By that, I mean you choose to start growing your team/LLC by hiring random devs off of a job listing.
Idk once you're past 15 people it's pretty obvious you're no longer indie really.
You're closer to B or AA dev team.
@@Bourikii2992 So if you "partner" with devolver digital but are only made of 5 people, you are fine? What if you are 2 people and get AQUIRED by someone like Gearbox publishing?
What if you are just a stand-alone studio of only 25 people? What if it's 100 people but a large percent of them do backend stuff like branding or is just a voice actor or Folly Artist (person who does sound effects)? The alternative being people who do texture work, animation, level design, 3D modeling, terrain and other assets, ect. There are alot of variables to question on "does this have any impact on the previous definition".
@@Hadeks_Marow "Partnered" sounds a hell of a lot like you have a publisher. If you're bought out by gearbox you now are just part of gearbox. You also get way, way more funding than indie developers usually get.
25 employees? Well the average game developer makes 116,000 a year lol. But let's reduce that to 70,000 because you're a small company of 25 people. That company is spending 1.75 million on just employees. That's an indie company to you?
@@Bourikii2992 Yes. Scale should be irrelevant to whether a company is independent or not. You're not going off of an actual definition, you're just going off of what feels right to you.
@@Bourikii2992You didn't exactly answer the first question. You referenced it, but didn't actually answer it, or at least, you weren't direct about answering it and left the answer kinda vague.
i feel like if we are going to continue to use "indie" to describe things it need to be based on the pretty cut-and-cry dictionary definition, and not on vibes
we don't need to water the term down to uselessness like music did, indie shouldn't be an 'aesthetic'
now if folks are dead-set on using a catch-all term we need a new one, one that is more broad and not already an existing term
It's funny that we try to categorize everything to make sense of them in the same way that we categorize movies by genre. Are there cowboys? Western. Are they making out? Romantic Western.
But with games you throw mechanics into the mix where you can have as much or as little of any mechanic as you like while still trying to innovate and come up with your own. How many roads must one travel to become a man? How many platforms must one jump to be a platformer?
The Star Wars prequel trilogy were indie films. Big budget from the creator's own pockets but no outside producers.
Brought this up with a friend and they shared their personal definition: "Is company leadership still part of the active creation of game assets"
I think I can stand by this one with the addition of "company leadership doesnt accept external corporate funding"
McDonalds, TacoBell and Walmart started as mom and pop until they franchised. Saying that things cannot change so we shouldn't label things so they never change is the most Canadian thing I've heard these morons say. A company can start out as indie, gain success and become a major company. Things DO change.
They didn't fuckin say shit about things cannot change. They're literally saying things DO change. Not just individual teams and companies, but how the industry works at large. And yet despite a thing changing people STILL call it indie, despite no LONGER being small or LITERALLY NOT INDEPENDENT. That's a big part of what they're even SAYING here. You fucking moron.
Yep, there's 2 examples in the arpg genre that both would consider started as indie and are no longer indie despite their GIGANTIC size difference. Blizzard and Grinding Gear games. GGG is 120 people. Blizzard is thousands. Neither are indie but both were started that way.
Oh, to see Woolie interrupting The Game Awards with the WHENS MAHVEL placard just like in that WWE match
I look at the term Indie the same way I look at souls-like. It's a checklist of items and more boxes you check the more confident I am in applying it.
My list for indie would include small team size, small budget, low processing requirement, older graphic style, smaller overall size, and a willingness to take chances on things the bean counters at major publishers would veto because it might make less money. A game might have some of these things but not be an indie.
Also, on team size and budget specifically, I would define it as relatively small compared to the big companies like Nintendo, Microsoft and so on.
Low budget
small team,
independent developer
no previous break out hits
There, there's your indie catagorization
Gamefreak seems to be a good test for this discussion. No one would call Pokemon indie games, and yet pretty much any non pokemon related project they put it out has that same small indie taste to it. Harmoknight, Little Town Hero, Tembo the Badass Elephant...are they indies if they are attached to the same studio that launched an empire across multimedia?
It's easy to call them indie because none of them have been as successful as Pokemon. Would you still say the same if they became big blockbusters?
@@1wayroad935I would personally, Undertale is massive, but it’s still indie
That'd be double A, wouldn't it?
People were unironically defending Arceus and Gen 8s terrible graphics with the "its/they're a small indie studio of only 300 people!"
Gamefreak is just totally incompetent and can't actually produce a Pokemon game without the direct help of a shitload of nintendo heavy hitters, hence why The Pokemon Company was created
fuckin Satoru Iwata was responsible for the vast majority of its success
Martin Scorsese very recently actually said he doesn’t like using “indie films” because it categories them and pigeonholes them to much
That exact same reasoning he gave can be shoved right back at the games industry/award shows.
Like really come the fuck on how stupid can the game awards be?
So I guess the solution is to call them "Arthouse"
@@cyberninjazero5659 I mean Arthouse is just kinda the same as indie but it’s fancier to say
I still cant believe that MARTIN SCORSESE is being pushed off to the sidelines in the movie industry
@@Certified-Bruh171 Just like "graphic novels" instead of "comics".
Will Eisner outright stated as much.
@@johnrivers3813because he's an asshole and a hack
We're all Indies if you think about it
for Mom and Pop stores the laws have that covered lol unlike video game genres a small business actually has written requirements that it needs to meet or not exceed
I think there was a MASHED cartoon about this, though that was talking about how genre distinctions don't really work for distinguishing indies from major releases. Braid and Mario both as "jump on the guys and save your girlfriend" games were the example. LIMBO was there for some reason.
my most anticipated indie game, D(eath)S(tranding)2
Im more interested in Pat's definition of RPG, does he think theyre only turn based games?
Tango Gameworks, published by Bethesda, who is owned by Microsoft, is not an indie company
the reason things have nonsense definitions is because Gamers can't read, this is also why the vast majority of Gamers absolutely cannot stand turn-based rpgs
Same thing goes for movies, the average moviegoer just wants to see some more sex and some more violence they don't care about the craft.
I do hope this little controversy motivates the TGAs to break away from the indie word and instead just include them alongside the big budget games. Baldurs Gate being an indie game by the basic Film definition just destroys everything and the word just needs to be discarded.
So the weird thing is that I remember Celeste once being nominated for GOTY alongside the big games that came out that year.
A *Best Low Budget Game* would be a pretty cool award actually.
If they do that what will just happen is that they will be not included at all and only AAA games will show up. At the end of the day it's just semantics, you can't really define like a RPG game either.
@@Wandersnatch.I mean... RPG might indeed be hard to define, but a lot of the genre flexibility there too is because of some hot clown shoes takes being given ANY leeway.
There's also a bit of historical blame there on Sega too who decided in the 90's that RPG meant "fantasy world games" before IMMEDIATELY making a bunch of sci-fi games and keeping the moniker. If you've ever heard someone try to argue Legend of Zelda is an RPG, because "the heart containers are sorts like leveling", this is the ACTUAL reason why. They're parroting ideas being echoed from another culture by people that didn't understand the original bad context and retroactively justifying it.
I always thought "indie" was a label to put on smaller games from smaller teams that were extremely good but not a lot of people played. Sort of like how we use cult classic for movies. I think the difference between a cult classic and an indie game is that cult classic's are like cruelty squad, or golden light, really unique and unconventional, where as an indie manages to have that polished feel to gameplay and takes a well known mechanic or idea and builds an incredible experience. So like for me and indie means a game that plays well, has a shocking amount of content for it's budget, and often sacrifices graphical fidelity for gameplay. A cult classic game is a game that will never see a game awards show but are incredibly rich with creativity and will usually have mechanics that you'd never think to put in a similar game, like how you eat your weapons for buffs in golden light, or the way the implants work in cruelty squad, or in wrought flesh how you swap out your organs, and usually the art style is meant to be weird and not a sacrifice due to budget. and then a AAA experience should mean you don't sacrifice gameplay and graphics are usually attempting to be photo real at the cost of needing to appeal to a broader audience, and often shoehorns in more traditional mechanics as to not alienate anyone, like a skinner box leveling system or accessability options. AA would mean a game that has all the same restrictions as AAA but usually a more unique story or aesthetic.
If I may direct everybody to Strong Bad Email 203 "Independent"
Talking about security at the events.
I will be more amused if someone who they let on stage decide to scrap. Like there is a game, it got super popular, they got a hold of the guy and it was all a plan to give Todd Howard a wedgie for liking chess or something.
Favorite indie game this year for me BattleBit Remastered and that was a game made by 3 people. It’s so hard to decide if a team of 50 is still a indie if there’re funded for years on a game without any trouble financially. It’s a confusing mess
No publisher and small studio probably no more than 5-10 employees and a budget of probably less than 1 million dollars. Apparently only top 5% make over 1 million dollars in sales.
No that French restaurant is not a mom and pop shop anymore. It's a a very large business at this point. I'd say mom and pop is a singular business created by a local. Brick and mortar is a larger business that might be franchised out to multiple people and at 15 stores I'd say that's out of the scope for both.
Indie game is a game created by an independent studio.
Summer game fest did have bouncers pat you see them rushing the stage to grab the guy when the camera goes to cut away
If a game is developed and published by the same small company it's likely an Indie. If the company has publicly traded stock it's disqualified. Indie games don't exploit customers with microtransactions. You know a game isn't Indie when there's tons of bad publicity about monetization updates bilking the player base, yet there's still enough fools and whales to keep them afloat. When a game franchise has become too big to fail from fools and whales it's far from Indie.
Who in their right fucking mind would think Baldur's Gate 3 is an indie game? It's *literally* an official D&D vidya, one of the most popular tabletop RPG's on the planet, it is the farthest possible from being indie.
The Creators are at the reigns of their own project. No parent companies. No investors.
The game genres are not that ambiguous. Maybe you think by mudding the waters it will stop comparisons and give weaker titles a chance. Games have stood and competed in their respective genres for years.
The exception doesn't disprove the rule. The genre definitions only look lose meaning when multiple examples are present.
We have already seen the big corps try to ape indie games and they got called out then we moved on.
Most companies have investors, it's public trading that's the distinction we need to make
"Best Indie Game" might be a stupid category but it's only like 10% as stupid as "Best Action/Adventure Game"
Technotise is definately an indie film since it was written directed and animated by like 4 people in an apartment.
Also qualifies for the comic since it was self published
Vga awards Armageddon Geoff is at the top as blaze
The cat?
@@1wayroad935 no from mk
Indie is like soulslike, it means "i wanted to put this tag on my game to get celeste fans to buy my game."
To the whole "indie's must be self-published" thing, it just reminded me of Petal Crash, a game published by Galaxytrail, an indie dev studio. So under the original definition, Freedom Planet 2 would be indie, but Petal Crash wouldn't, despite having a lower budget and development time than FP2 and the publisher being very small scale?
As a guy who is playing 2 very long beta games in mount and blade 2 just came officially and project zomboid indie companies are getting harder to detect for goty
>Zomboid
Have them release Build 42 first, then we can talk
Dave the Diver slaps tho
Everyone likes Dave the Diver. It's just regarding wether it's an Indie, and what even defines an indie that's the discussion.
@@leithaziz2716 It's as worthless of a discussion as the awards that sparked it usually are.
tbh, a mom and pop shop is a s i n g l e store owned by a family. if they get another, it's no longer a mom and pop shop, but a franchise. i think lol
No, it's a chain - franchise, i'm pretty sure, is when any jackass can go "hey, i want to open a [store name] at [location]" and go through a process, get approved, and then open that store in that place.
It wouldn't be a franchise, it would just be a company/LLC at that point. A franchise is a very specific thing in which the store is *owned* by locals, but they use the licenses of a larger corporate entity so that they can use their name, recipes, and supply lines. E.G. Walmart and Walgreens stores are not franchises, as they are owned by corporate middle manager suits who belong to a larger company, but McDonalds and Subways are because they get a small portion of the revenue and leave their employees to it.
man, can't wait for Zelda to win the Indie award, it totally got it in the bag, ha!
This reminds me of that idiot that kept trying to explain that Spiderman was a RPG because it had levels and skill trees or something stupid like that.
Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop is a game on Steam that is based on Alien Swarm, the Valve game from 2010, which is based on Alien Swarm, the Black Cat Games mod of Unreal Tournament 2004 from 2004. Is Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop an indie game? If I made a mod of Half-Life 2 called "this is just all of Half-Life 2 with a different title", would that be an indie game? Was the 2004 release of Alien Swarm an indie game?
I think it should be done to file size.
I don’t think we should totally scrap the genre indie. It’s now existed for years so regardless, it’s always going to exist.
We need a genre that showcases independent developers.
Ultimately we have to hold people that use the genre definition wrongfully, accountable.
All this talk about how useless game genres are as descriptors reminds me that I still have no clue what an Immersive Sim is supposed to be
If you can flush a toilet then it is immersive sim
My understanding is: RPG with many systems that can affect the environment and let you mess with how you handle missions. You'll also always get a person who talks about "emergent gameplay". The freedom you have to complete a task however you want is meant to lend to the idea of being an "immersive" experience.
I always thought that it was games that give you multiple ways to interact with the world and solve problems
Don't worry, no one really knows what an Immersive Sim is.
“Immersive Sim” is a design philosophy, not a genre.
Please consider looking up the article with this precise title on Google. It's really worth a read.
I really wish more big gaming channels decided to broadcast this notion, because limiting to defining it a mere genre is a huge disservice to game creation in general.
If I like it, it's indie. If I don't like it, it's AAA.
The Coffin of Andy and Leyley is the pure definition of indie AF.
Indie Horror is a very slippery slope by itself
Geoff is too much of a coward to have it at the Game Awards though
@@TAMAMO-VIRUS Incest FTW
Emphasis on AF
I think they can vibe check with best indie all they want since they at least added "best debut indie game", which is less of one. Most of their other categories are also vibe checks and have been since the beginning anyway.
Otherwise, I feel like "best indie" is always going to be kind of terrible anyway. What people want is some up-and-comer to win it, but what would actually happen is some well-known "indie" dev would eat up a nomination slot any year they put something out same as any other category with big budget games.
They should have also had "Best Original Title" though for bigger budget stuff, to complement "best debut indie". Needs to be one catch-all category that can't include RE4 Remake, BG3, Alan Wake, Spiderman, etc. Is your game a remake? Can't win it. Is your game something that exists within a larger series? Can't win it. Is your game based on popular IP in any way? Can't win it.
Best Original Title: No Remakes, No Sequels, No Adaptions.
"Indie" should split into
"Independent", "low budget" and "modern retro"
"Modern retro" is a horrible term overall.
It just pigeonholes valid and diverse art styles into a very narrow slice of the 20th century instead of something that can be built upon to generate new and vibrant art.
As if all games through the 80's and 90's weren't greatly distinguishable from one another...
Here is one thing I don't think people are considering. There are 2 different "indie" terms. There is "indie" the "game-genre" and then there is "indie" the developmental "classification".
Developmental background tends to not be related to the classification of gameplay (which is what "genre" is supposed to be used for). The problem is, despite these 2 terms using the same word. . . their definitions don't necessarily have to align with eachother. I think we need to come up with an alternative term for "indie" the "game-genre", which is probably what TGA is considering as to what to do for next year.
Either "Small scale" or "Niche appeal" could work
@@MattManDX1 Name me one side-scroller game that isn't from nintendo that people would not describe as having indie-vibes (genre, not developement).
Cause i could see people wanting to call ori and hollow knight "indie games". And just going with "indie-vibes" would not prevent the underlying issue of it just coming off as insulting to independent studios who were actually nominated.
I made the original request cause some games with indie-vibes can be considered large-scale. Where the only thing that defines it half the time is the visuals. Like if it has a low-poly art style.
@@Hadeks_Marow That's the main problem I think, people calling "Indie" a genre when the term is meant to be used as a financial descriptor. We just need to replace it with an actual name for the genre, like "Retro-Inspired" or "Small-Scope"
@@MattManDX1You can't deny tho that a "genre" has sprung due from the terms existence. So I don't necessarily agree with you on that the problem is that people use "indie" as a genre, so much as the problem just being that they used "that term" to name the genre by.
I know that's what you might have meant to say, but I'm just wanting to make the wording of the problem match up with the meaning as to not leave any loose ends.
R.I.S.S. I like the name, but are we sure that fully covers every title that would fall in this genre?
Merfight: Curse of the Arctic Prince
I think the real question is "what is A or AA games"
Indie means independently developed
RPG means role playing game
It's not hard to define
This really feels like overthinking.
It’s called Indie.
If the studio is independent, then it is indie.
Simple.
The waters get muddy when publishers are involved, especially when they partly fund the project. Like what happened with No Man's Sky.
What is independent? If you partner with a publisher like Devolver Digital but are not owned by them and are a dev team of like, 2 to 5 people, are you no longer independent? If you got your funding through kickstarter, are you independent or did depend on the crowdsourcing of the internet?
@@Hadeks_Marow
If you partner with a Publisher, but you still own your own IP and Studio, you are independent. Therefore Indie.
If you are owned, you are not independent.
@@1wayroad935
But does the Publisher of No Man's Sky own the IP of the game, or own the Studio?
It's not about funding. It's about ownership.
@@TheProphessionalGeek But are you not depending on the publishers support?
This is what I mean when I question your original wording. What definition do you give the english term of "independent". Cause by most, it means "do it by yourself" without relying on outside aid. It's only "not complicated" when you don't define the exacts.
And as the video brought up. That would make Balders Gate and Fortnite "indie games" as well. They are owned by the people who makes them. And no, epic games does not have a parent company. It is own by Tim with over 50% of the stock, meaning the controlling interest, which means he's incharge.
So perhaps there's a caveat of "independent except if you are getting outside aid. . . also your company/group has to be privately owned/not on the stock market. . . you know, and any extra rules needed to rule out the bigger fish as needed".
Doing away with the category entirely to instead focus on "Best Debut" from a new development team would probably be the best option.
Ayo..... Crackle crackle!
the one time copying movies' ideas would work, the industry refuses to.
its Independant if its self published.
simple.
Destiny 2 was technically self-published following the split with Activision.
Edit: I wrote this comment before i heard Pat and Woolie give the example of Baldur's Gate 3 being self-published.
So you would consider Baldur's Gate 3 Indie? They handled most of the Budget themselves from my understanding.
Edit: Ok, I continued the cycle unintentionally.
The obvious categorization is that it caters to a niche audience. But that's a nightmare scenario of actually quantifying it.
Nothing screams content creator brain rot more than wanting someone to storm the stage so you can have content to talk about on your twitch stream
It's absolutely crazy that some people don't consider big budget indie games as indie simply because of the scope of the game. Or because they have "x number of employees" over a made up number in your head that disqualifies it from being an independent game.
I guess the only deviation begs the question of wether those developers would still be considered "underdogs" in the market then. At least, that's part of what I assumed the point of being called "indie" was. That you're going up against juggernauts in the industry and might have a smaller audience that knows about you.
Like they said, people are still working with the old definition of what indie is supposed to be like
One issue is, if you put out +20 SUPER successful games prior, does that not make you a very established company? If you are an established company, are you still indie? So then does that mean first party titles are indie? If you have more than one team, are you still indie? What if you are not owned by anyone, are self published but have a HUGE networth as a company? What if the company is privately owned?
@@Hadeks_Marow what the hell does a good track record or being an established company have to do with being an independent developer?
@bicksbernd1640 because if we don't narrow this down then nintendo will technically fit under the definition of indie
Aaand this is how I learn TFH is ending dev and not finishing story mode. Fuck.
I mean "indie" is short for independent.
Indie games is any game that has been self published but also looks like it was made with the budget of a ham sandwhich
Hearthstone originally was made by 14-16 people. Just Puttin that out there.
i say if the team is under 20 people, the company is private and they're the only people working there, and the game is self-published, the piece of media is indie. i think that's the common sense definition.
for instance, hi fi rush and bomb rush cyberfunk have sort of a similar aesthetic going on, but hi fi rush is not an indie game, and bomb rush cyberfunk is
so like, if jeff bezos were to retire from all other work tomorrow and make and publish a game by himself that would be an indie game even though he's got more money than some cities probably lol. them's the rules
What about bull examples can we think of?
Is pokemon an indie game if gamefreak has notoriously small dev team?
Is Slay the Spire NOT an indie game if it was published by the Humble Bundle corp?
every time i think on this topic on geoff game fun times awards is among us winning in 2020 even though it came out in 2018 and only got popular in 2020 the awards mean nothing im there for the cringe and game announcement
bloodsport between the game directors would be sick.
here's the truth about definitions, realty doesn't care for them. For example, what's the difference between a hardcore game vs a casual game? There isn't one, if you play Animal Crossing for 800 hours that's not casual play that's insane. Same with genres, what makes an RPG? role-playing, leveling, characters, story? Who knows! because reality is messy.
Reality DOES care for them though. "Hardcore" and "Casual" aren't definitions, they're just vague tone descriptors. You can be subjectively correct if you consider Animal Crossing to be a hardcore game, you'd be objectively incorrect if you considered Animal Crossing to be a first person shooter.
Hmm, if I were to define an "independent" game studio/developer in the modern era, it would be an entity that is not owned (or majority financed) by, nor itself owns, any other game dev/publishing entities (unsure about non-game related entities). I'm less concerned about who publishes the games, as long as they're not notably involved in the actual production of the game (or outright own/hired the developer). Probably still a lot of edge cases to work out, but I think it addresses the fundamental concern of what it means to be "indie", to me anyway 🤷
Chicken of the Sea
I remember a guy got really mad at me for calling french comics indie years ago because people who can read the language don't consider them indie I guess
I just meant it by the fact that 75% of foreign comics aren't translated or are so ridiculously expensive that besides tintin and asterix noone really knows about those comics.
I mean, you never see woolie referencing french comics on here
So if a Spider-Man comic released in English doesn't get translated into French for some reason does that mean Spider-Man is now an indie comic from French people's perspective?
@@MattManDX1 lol I have no idea the people on readcomiconline and disqus are insane and just argued just to argue. its the kinda site where if you say a hot take you're called a liberal
Stockholders, if any company did anything to help the gane that has stockholders. It is no longer indie.
all I know is that the game I'm trying to make is truly an indie. alone like a bad dog, no cash and being made in a rotten potato pc that shouldn't even work by 2000's standars (2gb of ram is pain) lol
You should check out the hit indie game Cyberpunk 2077
People call dark souls an indie game to this day to which I reply, just because it looks and plays like outdated garbage doesn't mean it's a indie game.
What is an “Indie Game”? Anachronistic
I still think it should be self publish based. Sure, Baldur's Gate and Fortnite would be considered indie. But with this definition of indie you onow that the game wasn't beholden to a third party company when it was made.
Look at it like Star Wars. the biggest indie movie series....until Dinsey bought it. Then it stopped being indie.
Baldur's Gate is beholden to Wizards of the Coast though since they own the D&D ip, automatically disqualifying the game as an indie title.
Fortnite is made by Epic Games, who are themselves publishers. You cannot be an indie developer and a publisher at the same time, that's like calling yourself a vegan carnivore.
@@MattManDX1 Licensing an IP disqualifying you form being indie is stupid. You're still an independent studio.
@@Deminese2 But they can't make Baldur's Gate 4 without asking for permission, which prevents it from being an independent game. Their own Divinity: Original Sin series are indie games though.
An "indie game" is any game I like for which I can plausibly use the title "indie game" to deflect criticism of it.
"Look, bro, you need to support indie games, so just buy it already."
I think the only proof you need that the game industry has no idea what the fuck it's doing with genre names is that an alternate name for "Metroidvania" was only codified within the last decade, and barely anyone uses it.
Easy, game made by a team not backed by a middling or larger company.
In this video, Pat and Woolie ignore the possibility that a single definition can have more than one quailifier for exactly twenty-one minutes and thirty seconds 🙂
> It can't be funding because x
> Well it can't be team size because y
> But it can't be self publishing because z
> Then what could it be???
I’m pretty sure that’s the point. Eventually with enough modifiers, the scope becomes so narrow that most games that are often seen as indie are not, and the fact we need such a specific definition makes the point of the genre useless. Dave the Diver is a smaller project by a smaller team, but it has a lot of security. If we make it too specific, then now a ton of other games that now have no such label and leave it all up in the air
What I want to know is along what terms should we categorize video games?
Because the term "Role Playing Game" is so loaded and vague that literally any game I think of I can find a way to define it as a RPG. I know what its "intended" to be used for but the borders of that are as obscured as Silent Hill. Which would technically qualify as a RPG!
Right now there are two types of role. Party and story. Honestly that's it. No party system and or no side B to your quest no role to play.
@@shadowreaverrising1753 by that definition NBA2k Jam is a Role Playing Game.
@@music79075 If you want to go there yeah. Most people get hung up on the witcher for the player having control of the narrative. The first thing they go to is the "role" in a story. If you truly have a say in the story of NBA 2k then yeah.
@@shadowreaverrising1753 but that's my point exactly. Those games are almost nothing alike and yet they are in the same Genre.
@@music79075 how much is fallout like the Witcher? I like to tie it to the character sheet. I think it's good to have one role or the other since people are so hung up on character roles. Which isn't that widely used(Bethesda, bioware, witcher). For decades we played roleplaying games without being able to affect the story.