The day before launch: It’s not a scam! We haven’t sold anything!

I gave it a week but it was less than that which is wild.

Guys, I’m starting to think this game may not be good.

Well, that’s suspicious.

I saw this like fifteen minutes ago, they shut this game down in record time, faster then any of their previous games, fucking hilarious. The amount of defenders for this game I’m seeing is alarming though, I get people are trying to justify their purchase but god damn, the copium levels are off the charts. “It’ll get…

I feel as though it qualifies as an indie.  If I were to produce a game and then run it by a large studio to publish and, against all odds, they chose to do so instead of immediately deleting my email, I don’t think that would make my game less ‘indie’.

Wow. What a load of You know it’s really the end product of providing a lot of really high quality nutrients to the strongest male bovines, and you know that can be seen as a good thing, but in the end it’s complicated to answer what the real result is, and-

Employees of NEXON making a small game does not make it indepe…

Was it self-published by the developer? It’s indie. That’s it.

Either cost has to be under 10 mil or employee count under 40. No other metric makes sense to me in defining indies.

“I mean, you could argue ‘Does independent mean the budget of the game?”

Smaller publishers are generally a lot more free form with some of their contracts. Coffee Stain Publishing for example, let the team that made Deep Rock Galactic to keep their game despite separating from them. The only thing that remains is that DRG still says Coffee Stain on it’s splash screen but all the other DRG…

Indie Rock is a genre, indie music is literally any band that hasn’t signed onto a major music label.

I kinda agree but also not agree at the same time. Indie films are generally using larger studios as a means of distributing, not producing. Sometimes those distros will put some cash into a project, but they generally don’t fully back those projects alone. Those are strictly for indie projects, projects that…

The difference is that there’s no Oscar category for “Best Indie Film.” That’s because “indie” isn’t a genre or specific element of filmmaking. That’s why “indie” shouldn’t be an award category. It doesn’t have any specific criteria and is absurdly broad.

Except “indie” isn’t a style or genre. There’s a huge variety of indie games across multiple genres and with completely different aesthetics. If indie means “lower budget” than that diversity increases even more.

Because indie rock is a genre. Indie games are not. My definition of an indie game has always been “created, published, and maintained by the same single person or team of people that started the project, and did not receive outside funding, development, or marketing”.

“You can still make indie rock if you are signed to a major label”
That’s because music has gone through the same “we want the credibility of being ‘indie’ without actually being independent of anything in particular” rigmarole and the actual meaning of the word lost out. Hopefully gaming can avoid that. I’m not…

Maybe Jeff and the TGA people should read Handmade Pixels by Jesper Juul before they go off half-cocked giving out nominations to “indie games” without defining what that means. The book provides a pretty good insight into how people construct the notion of what an “indie game” is.

Of course he disingenuously doesn’t even list the definition that 99% of people go by, and that generated the controversy, and that has been the standard for decades until big companies decided that they wanted their publisher-backed small games to qualify for “indy” awards:

I thought Indie meant you don’t ultimately answer to a board of shareholders who only care about making money.