The Game Awards is an odd show. It gives little attention to smaller/independent games, relative to other game awards, so you get the sense that its jury doesn’t play a wide variety of games, and the glitzy award announcements with Imagine Dragons performances are sprinkled between thick chunks of advertising. The Game Awards looks expensive, but it feels cheap.1
Maybe it just seems odd because it’s for gamers, not developers, but hoo boy, that does not stop us from talking about it. Continuing its long standing commitment to forgetting indie games, TGA recently nominated Dave The Diver in its Best Independent Game category, and much discourse has ensued. Geoff Keighley, the organiser of TGA, has even responded to the criticism by abdicating all responsiblity, which has gone down as well as a shart at a funeral.
“Indie” is a contentious term (we’ll get into it later) but Dave The Diver is not “Indie” by any meaningful understanding of the word, having been developed and published by a subsidiary born out of Nexon, a company currently worth 18 billion dollars.
However, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s an indie game if you’re just looking at the Steam page; it has the pixel art aesthetics and life sim mechanics that are a staple of many indie games, and a studio with a twee name that you’ve never heard of is listed as both developer and publisher, lending the appearance of a self-published independent game. Nexon is mentioned once, in small print, at the very bottom.2
I think it’s actually cool and good that big companies want to fund smaller, weirder games with a more unique visual identity and strong creative vision behind them3, but as a developer working solo, off of personal savings, from her childhood bedroom, it’s a big fucking problem for me that multi-billion dollar companies want to compete with me directly like this.
And this isn’t just a problem of semantics or definitions, because if more games are going to be made by large companies that cosplay as indie through deceptive marketing, then players are going to expect the kind of polish and volume of content from indie games that a big company can deliver, but despite my ambitions, I cannot. And if my games, and other real indie games start getting bad reviews on the basis of that expectation, people will not buy them, and indies will struggle more than we already do.
This is why “indie” is not an aesthetic, or at least, you could say Dave The Diver is indie “in spirit”, but you could not categorise it as “indie” and nominate it for an award on that basis.
Or, you know, you could, but it’d be daft and inconsiderate.
Okay, so, what is “indie”?
“But Sophie!” I hear you cry, “What about small studios that partner with a publisher? They’re taking outside funding, but they still get to be called indie!” Ah yes, as I mentioned, “indie” is a contentious term, so now I’m going to try and define it, for my sins.
To be clear, I’m aiming for a descriptive definition, meaning I’m not going to try and say how the word should be used, but rather, describe how it is used. And obviously, different people use it differently, but I’m going for something that I think most people can get behind4, and thus, should probably be used by institutions like The Game Awards.
As a starting point, we’ll use the literal definiton of “independent”. The studio doesn’t have a parent company, and the game is self-published. However, this puts us in a weird situation where Baldur’s Gate 3, one of the biggest games of this year, is “indie”, and so are Valve games, while Hotline Miami is not. Some of you would probably be willing to bite the bullet and say that’s fine, but I don’t think it really fits how “indie” is used.
I think, along with the studio not having a parent company, the other key thing to be “indie” is financial insecurity, which is a tricky metric in the games industry given there’s a lot of that going around, especially now, so bear in mind this is all relative.
Small studios self-publishing have a lot of financial insecurity. With no publisher, they have to raise the development funds themselves, and handle marketing themselves, which is difficult, and carries a lot of risk. If they want to self-publish their next game, that means the current one needs to make enough to both recoup dev costs of the current game, and fund development of the next one.
If a studio partners with a publisher, they can get additional funding and marketing support, but in general that relationship only lasts for a single project, and there’s still a high risk it doesn’t pan out, and if it doesn’t, then it’s more difficult to fund the next project, as you’d be seen as higher risk by publishers.
In both of the above scenarios, if the current project fails financially, then there’s a very high chance the studio closes, and everybody loses their jobs.5
In a small team that’s part of a larger company however, if the current project fails the company might be able to absorb the loss, then people may just move onto the next project, or become a support studio for Shootygame 20: The Third Sequel To The Fourth One: Remake. Still not a particularly desirable fate, but better than everyone losing their jobs. A company that holds multiple studios will also be able to pool resources across teams, centralise things like accounting and HR, and have stronger marketing connections than an independent studio would have.
The “financial insecurity” heuristic disqualifies Valve from the indie label, as they make a ton of money from Steam, which enables them to have a very loose and inefficient internal structure, and absorb the cost of projects that end up dead ends.
It’s also hard to say from the outside, but it probably disqualifies Larian, as they’re likely doing pretty great from the massive success of Baldur’s Gate 3, and even if their next project is self-funded and fails, they could probably get publisher funding or get acquired fairly easily with their well-earned reputation.
Another big studio that might be indie Keighley mentions in response to the recent criticism is Kojima Productions, but again, not financially insecure. Any publisher would kill to work with Kojima, and he’s currently close with Sony, who have infinity money to spend on games.
So why use “indie” if it doesn’t mean “indie”?
Based on this looser definition, you might think that we should use a different word to refer to “indie” games, but there’s no clear alternative at the moment. You could try to do some mental gymnastics, and say that once you reach a certain size, you’re no longer independent of being swayed by larger industry trends, but I feel like that’s pushing it a bit.
There’s also a lot of grey area in this definition; “financial insecurity” is a spectrum, and while I think you can place a team on the spectrum by asking “what’s the chance that everybody on the project will be laid off if it fails financially?”, there’s a real debate to be had over where the line is that you are insecure enough to be indie. Like, what about a studio of 50 people that has a pretty good history? I don’t think that it could be widely agreed where the line is, but I think, in the way that “indie” is widely used, small studios with short histories are inside the line.
And maybe we could just be cool with the definition having some grey, and not have endless pointless debates about it, and also not say silly things like “it has some grey area, therefore, anything can be indie”. What a world that would be.
If this sounds snobby, don’t worry; I am a snob.
On the other hand, I like Imagine Dragons, so maybe I’m not.
Despite the marketing, even Nexon won’t call it indie in interviews. According to this article (via Google Translate, so, grain of salt) “It may look like an indie, but it’s not necessarily so. I do not believe that innovation occurs through hunger, and I hope that bold challenges will be achieved within the large and solid framework of Nexon.”
See: Pentiment, Hi-Fi Rush; neither makes a secret of their Microsoft backing.
This also means you might disagree with my definition, and think people should use a different definition. If this is you, kick rocks. That’s unfortunately not how language works.
Which is worse than a very large percentage of people losing their jobs, as can happen even when a project is financially successful.