@djlink Also not sure the best way to divide the two "types" of indies. Maybe the number of people working in the game? If a big publisher was putting money in a studio of 1 or two people I think I would still consider it Indie. Hmm not a simple question...
@djlink Knowing Kojima productions had 80 people working on the game, I wouldn't exactly call them indie. E.g. Remedy is considered AAA and their team size is around 100 people.
@djlink What about public grants? If a game is largely funded with taxpayer’s money, is that still independent? Is “indie” primarily about independent studios or small budgets and teams?
@djlink Well, that's the problem. Kojima Production is officially an independent studio. So any game they make is technically an "independent game".
So someone could argue that Death Stranding is an indie game, just as much as Undertale is.
The definition of indie is split into 2 groups of games, and everyone in the industry needs to find new and better words to describe what they mean.
I hope there isn't such a lax "indie" category next year.
How do you define an indie game?
@djlink the Games Understander, surrounded by well-funded industry veterans and literal Hollywood celebrities, putting on a motion capture suit for his cameo performance in a title set to be published by one of the Big 3 platform holders: You know, a lot of people are saying that what we're doing here is indie
@djlink Feels like a huge difference between having your independent studio make payroll & happens to have a deal with an external publisher to help funding (miss a milestone build or some other contract stipulation & the studio internal mgmt would need to pivot hard to find alternative income but it's in-house) vs being a subsidiary of a major publisher (who are the ones who run your payroll & could reassign anyone on the project at any moment).
@djlink maybe they should just look at the capital invested and draw a line there to separate big productions from small ones, so a 1-2 person developer doesn't have to compete with e.g. EA, Sony, or even Larian for that matter
Add comment