Most people think being an indie developer and game means a certain look of the game and the budget they had to work with. I discussed this over and over again. People don’t know what indie means! Publisher and investor takes the independent status away. The company or team is no longer an indie studio. Self publishing is indie, regardless of how much money and time and people the game required to make.
Agreed, I think the Single-I, Double-I, Triple-I tiers do a good job of illustrating the different budget and resources available to differently sized indie developers while still properly classifying them as “indie” because they still have full creative control and the power to set their own goals and timelines with no external strings attached to put pressure on it by investors and shareholders who don’t give a fuck about anything other than money. Sometimes Triple-A developers can act with a high level of independence too, but it’s always conditional and subject to change because those strings are there and they can be pulled at any time. With indie developers, that creative and developmental freedom is structurally explicit. At least until they sell out (but that’s when we stop calling them indie).
Stardew Valley is an indie game with a publisher. It is not about publishing.
How is it independent, if its no longer independent? Edit: Note, I’m not playing mind games here. This is a serious question. Maybe I misunderstand something here.
Independently developed but not independently published.
From there it just depends on if you personally consider that still being “indie” by your definition.
Does “indie” for you mean “a studio which independently develops games” or does it mean “a studio that does everything independently”
I think this is a good an important distinction.
It also depends on the publisher’s involvement. There are many publishers that actually contribute to development by providing resources, including art and design recommendations or contractors
Curious if you guys would consider Remedy Indie? They are independent, self published, and dont have any owning interests…
Yes. By those parameters they meet the definition of “indie”.
Remedy would be considered an independent AA studio.
Unfortunately people conflate single-A games with indie games. (Probably because most indie games are also single-A games)
Remedy is definitely indie, but I’d consider them an AA studio
I think the weirder question to ask is how much publisher/investor pressure should there be for a game to no longer be considered indie. Because it seems to be that there’s many publishers that exert little to no control over a game’s contents, especially if the publisher is itself an indie game studio. For a while, as well, Microsoft seemed to have not applied any editorial pressure to any of the studios that they bought. So would these games (eg Ori) still be considered indie?
Yea, good example of that is Dwarf Fortress, which has an indie publsiher (kitfox)
