The Game Awards got it wrong this year. One of the titles nominated for Best Independent Game, Dave the diver, was produced by Nexon, one of the largest video game studios in South Korea. No matter how much you squint, it's not indie. Dave the diver is an excellent pixel art game about deep sea fishing and restaurant management, but it was commissioned and financed by Nexon subsidiary Mintrocket, with billions of dollars and decades of experience under its belt.
When The Game Awards nominees were announced on November 13, fans were quick to point out the error and the recurring debate over what “indie” means was reignited. Taehwan Kim, Mintrocket supervisor at Nexon, weighed in on November 14 and said Dave the diver “It may seem like an indie, but that's not necessarily the case.” He listing the Best Independent Game nominees now includes a reader-generated context tag that reads: “Dave the diver It is not a standalone game. Mintrocket, the game's developer, is a subsidiary of Nexon, Korea's largest gaming company. “They are not independent in any sense of the word.”
A discussion arose throughout November about the definition of “indie,” but it raised more questions than it answered. A common conclusion was that the media that voted Dave the diver Those who entered the indie category were fooled by its pixel art, a style associated with indie games. During a Live Q&A on Twitch On November 26, The Game Awards organizer Geoff Keighley argued that “independent” was a broad term with an unknown definition, before essentially saying Dave the diverThe inclusion of in the independent category was the jury's fault.
Specifically, Keighley said the following: “It's independent in spirit and (it's) a small game with, I don't know what the budget is, but it's probably a relatively small budget game. But it's from a larger entity, while there are other games on that list that are from much smaller studios. Even as Dredge I think it's published by Team17, so is it independent or not because you have a publisher? It's a really complicated thing to understand and make strict rules about it, so we let people use their best judgment. And you can agree or disagree with the options, but the fact that Dave the diver “Being on that list meant that of all the indie games the jury reviewed, or what they thought were indie games, that was one of the top five they reviewed this year.”
The jury is made up of 120 media outlets (Engadget has traditionally been one of them, but this year we did not participate in the vote). and look what happened), so Keighley attributes the mistake to mass hysteria and moves on. Meanwhile, there's still little consensus on what constitutes an indie game, at The Game Awards or elsewhere.
I've reported on video games for 13 years, and indies are a focus of my coverage. I went back in the past and have written about this because these are the experiences that speak to me personally. The independent scene is the source of the industry's magic. This isn't just a debate about language: “indie” is a distinction that identifies which games and teams need outside support to survive and expand their innovations. Understanding etiquette can help players make decisions about where to spend their money, the lifeblood of any game development studio.
All that said, the debate over the definition of “indie” isn't new, but it's constantly changing and something I've spent a lot of time contemplating. So, I'm here to offer guidance on the question of what makes an indie game or studio indie. It's a strangely complicated topic and my approach is one of many, but the flexible framework I use might help resolve some common and recurring arguments.
Basically, it's about the system, man.
I'm joking, but I'm not joking either. Generally, when I'm trying to decide if something is truly independent, I ask three questions:
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Is the team on the payroll of the conventional system?
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Is the game or equipment owned by the owner of a platform?
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Do artists have creative control?
The first question is to identify where a studio's money comes from and what kind of support a game has outside of sales. If a team is wholly owned by another company of any size, it is not independent. We're not talking about publishing deals; This initial question is about acquisitions or spinoffs of larger studios. Dave the diver is a prime example here: it's developed by Mintrocket, a subsidiary of Nexon that was created only to develop more content experimental games for the publisher. Dave the diver It's definitely not indie, and we're only on question one.
The second query feeds into the first and is useful for making fine distinctions about games that exist in gray areas. How about something like Cyberpunk 2077? It's a big-budget game made by CD Projekt RED (CDPR), a studio that, at first glance, looks like it could be independent. However, there are two factors that leave it out of play for me. First, CD Projekt, the umbrella organization that supports CDPR's game creation, is a publicly traded company with shareholders and a board of directors to answer to. Second, CD Projekt owns GOG, a distribution center that allows the studio to sell its own games and DLC outside of Steam and the Epic Games Store. This ability to sell directly to gamers on a massive scale takes CD Projekt out of the independent realm. Generally, the companies with the most influence and money are the console makers and platform owners like Valve, Xbox, PlayStation, Epic Games, Ubisoft, EA and, yes, CD Projekt. They are the AAA system and everything they own is not independent.
Finally, let's move on to the editors. Sorry Keighley, but getting a publisher has very little to do with whether a game is independent these days. In 2023 we will be lucky to have a thriving independent industry constantly fighting against the AAA complex with different goals, more diverse voices and a broader sense of innovation, and publishing is a big part of this system. Today, publishers focused on the independent sector () tend to include clauses that protect a developer's creative vision, preventing the larger company from interfering with artistic decisions and keeping the game independent at its core. Once upon a time, it might have made sense to only consider self-published indie games, but that era is long gone.
The indie scene has evolved tremendously since the early 2010s, when games like Braid, super meat boy and Fez They were forging the modern shape of the market. Back then, self-publishing was all the rage for indie developers because it was often their only option, and as a result, there were clearer lines between AAA, AA, and indie games. Devolver Digital found its first big success as an independent publisher with Hotline Miami in 2012, and that was around the time the floodgates opened. In 2014, when the industry's biggest companies began funding and publishing programs for them, the number of indie games skyrocketed on platforms like Steam (remember?), App Store, Xbox, PlayStation, and Ouya (RIP).
Today, indie games are standard on all consoles. There are several publishers focused on the indie sector, including Devolver, Annapurna Interactive, Panic, Raw Fury, Team17 and Netflix, and most of them offer complete creative freedom as their main selling point. Meanwhile, platform owners like Sony and Xbox are eager to sign distribution deals with developers of all sizes in an effort to secure exclusives and grow their streaming libraries. It's the most stable (and busiest) indie scene there has ever been. Having a publisher has no bearing on whether a game is independent.
Be property by an editor, however, changes everything (see question one). This is more worrying than ever, as platform owners like Microsoft, Sony, and Epic Games have recently been buying up the studios they like. Hell, even Devolver has recently dipped into the acquisition pond, which, yes, means those teams are no longer independent.
The “indie” label is temporary. Certain studios may be independent, but an individual game may not be, and many small businesses flow between states as they age and take advantage of growth opportunities. Bungie, for example, started out as an independent team, then was absorbed into the AAA complex under Xbox, and then broke free and became independent again briefly, before Sony placed it back into the cold embrace of the mainstream system.
So yeah, that's my way of determining if a game or studio is independent. By all means, take my triplet of questions and have fun trying to break the logic; It probably won't take long. There is no perfect structure here and there are many outliers within my own framework. Alan Wake II, according to my questions, would be considered an independent game, but its developer, Remedy Entertainment, is a publicly traded company with shareholders and a board of directors. This brings the studio and game to The System for me, but honestly, I'm still unsure of those labels as I write this. It's okay: when all else fails, look into your game-loving soul and ask: Can this team exist without my support? (Alan Wake IIFor what it's worth, it's worth playing, regardless of your feelings about Remedy shareholders).
Does Mintrocket need my support to continue? Dave the diver And your creative team? Probably not, and definitely not in the same way as Larian Studios, the independent developer and publisher of Baldur's Gate 3. Baldur's Gate 3 is an excellent, expansive 3D adventure from an independent studio and was nominated for Game of the Year at The Game Awards, but was snubbed in the Best Independent Game category. Meanwhile, Dave the diver, a nice title backed by billions of dollars, is nominated for the indie award, but not for Game of the Year. It seems that The Game Awards jury made the classic mistake of seeing pixel art and immediately calling it indie. This is an unforced error, but it reveals a point we can all agree on:
Indie is not an aesthetic.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-game-awards-raises-an-old-question-what-does-indie-mean-205211035.html?src=rss
