Good Morning Friends! This morning I am going to spin off of a topic that started on the Blaugust Discord. Side note and a bit of a plug… every single day there are discussions like this happening there. Ultimately a conversation thread spun up in the Post Discussion channel about what actually denotes the title “Indie Game” and to a lesser extent what makes something a “AAA Game”. These two terms are often times bandied about as opposite ends of some sliding spectrum. What I present to you today is that we often use terms with concrete certainty like “hardcore” or “casual” without them really having any concrete meaning associated with them. I feel the same is entirely true for what we think of as “Indie Games”.
I first heard the term “indie” as referred to record labels or bands. I remember listening to a lot of great albums on Sub Pop or SST. Collectively it was agreed that this term meant any band or label that did not get big label support and as a result was not getting much in the way of airplay on the radio. This sort of music was largely relegated to college radio stations or other smaller independently owned stations that had programming other than “Top 40”. I still remember the weird feeling when Red Hot Chili Peppers crossed over from being a very underground phenomena to being on a major label and that you could find cassette singles in Walmart or hear them on the local rock radio station. However just as the fact that radio has no real relevance anymore, I would suggest that “Indie” doesn’t mean a whole lot in gaming terms either.
To illustrate this point, let’s have a thought experiment. I present to you four games that all have had fairly wide success. Which of these are independent games? How do you even quantify what independent means? I see lots of twitter accounts for example heralding that they only play Indie games to give Indie developers airtime… but what does that even mean really? Does “Indie” denote a design ethic or an art style, or does it simply mean an independently held studio not owned by a large publisher or first party platform? Let’s break down each of these four games and present the information we know about each of them.
- Hades – Developed by Supergiant Games which is a studio of around 20 people. Supergiant originally had a publishing contract with Warner Bro.s Interactive Software, but more recently they entered into an exclusive publishing deal with Take-Two Interactive that relates specifically to physical game editions.
- Valheim – Developed by Iron Gate Studio which at the time of creating the game had around 5 employees. This was published through Coffee Stain Publishing, which was acquired by Embracer Group in 2018.
- Death Stranding – Developed by Kojima Productions LLC which is an independently held studio reformed out of the ashes of a similarly named studio once owned by Konami. It has around 80 employees and the development of Death Stranding was in part funded through a timed exclusive deal with Sony Interactive Entertainment. Additionally there is a publishing deal with 505 Games to handle the PC release only.
- Cuphead – Developed by Studio MDHR with a staff of around 20 people. This was funded in part due to an exclusivity deal with Microsoft that lasted a little over a year.
So again I ask you, which of these games is an “Indie”? The truth is I really do not know. Before this thought experiment I would have said Death Stranding was not but Valheim was… however in truth the data could flip in the opposite direction given that Embracer Group is now one of the largest publishers. My original definition of what made an Indie studio would fall along these lines:
An Independent Games studio is any studio not owned exclusively by a first party platform or is not the exclusive subsidiary of one of the major games publishers.
So under that language if you were not owned by one of the platforms of publishers that held big ticket E3 shows… you were an Indie. By that specific verbiage every game in the above list would qualify as “Indie”. However I feel like that might be disingenuous as often times there is another criteria that folks bring into the mix. That of course is budget and the truth is I could not find any reasonable numbers surrounding the budget of any of the titles above. My gut reaction would be that Death Stranding had the highest production budget and Valheim the lowest… with the others taking the middle ground and probably Hades having a higher budget than Cuphead.
I still say that right now, with the way that games work and publishing in general happens between the assorted platforms… that none of these titles have any real meaning. I would say the same is true with AAA games… which is a term I found out yesterday apparently comes from the ratings of financial bonds. We are going through a really weird phase, especially with Microsoft acquiring what used to be large publishers to turn them into semi-exclusive vassal states. I think in the coming years the differentiators between all of these terms will become more meaningless. While we as human beings love to classify things into silos, I submit that the only meaningful designation right now is “games I enjoyed” and “games I did not enjoy”.
I know I am riding on the fumes of a discussion that has already died down on the Blaugust Discord, but if you have any more thoughts to add to the mix I would love to see them below.
There was a time when you indie games were self-published or shareware and anything on the shelves at a place like MicroCenter were not indie games… except for the few that reached some level of critical mass and could get on some buyer’s list of things to stock. Now it seems more of a brag or an attitude as much as anything.
As we chatted about on Discord, there are AAA games and there are indie games and then there is the gap in between. I recall Smed talking about Daybreak being an “indie” when Columbus Nova bought them from Sony. Sure, they were not making any AAA games… they barely made anything new at all in the Daybreak era… but they were hardly an indie either. Being owned by an investment group looking to extract money from the enterprise is on par with being owned by EA or Ubi or whoever in my book. It also feels like being an established studio with successful titles diminishes ones indie status a bit as well.
And, of course, in the age of Steam, where 12K new titles showed up in 2021, the storefront barrier has been pretty effectively broken down. So maybe the continuum between AAA and indie is dictated as much by marketing budget as anything at this point.
In music, “Indie” nowadays is literally no more than a description of a particular sound. Most people who use the term at all know pretty much what that sound is, especially if you add “rock” or “pop” to the end. It usually has a lot of guitars in it! The term did originate with distribution and record labels but it’s probably been the best part of thirty years since that’s been its primary meaning. You can definitely be an indie band on a major label these days.
“Indie game” is a woolier term, I think, but I’m not really up to speed on gaming jargon. I’ve generally taken it to mean work produced by a small studio. It’s analagous to “independent retailer” in retailing. It mostly means not owned and operated by a corporation, although who decides what is or isn’t large enough to count as a corporate I’m not sure. I don’t believe publishing has anything to do with it at all – an indie could be published by the biggest megacorp in the world and it would still be an indie, so long as ownership remained with the original creators.
While I do agree that what you said works for the actual definition, I think “Indie” as a genre is more of a “values” type of thing. As you said already, popular artists in the music industry and big labels often have these “produce the next hit single” mentality. I think the big game developers and publishers want to do the same while smaller Indie Devs often just want to create a game that may be enjoyed by others. Because of that, Indie (at least to me) is more of a Genre of “niche games that aren’t for everyone”. Often there are messages or values in there or interesting game mechanics – all of which wouldn’t be marketable if it was published for a broader audience.
My definition of indie would be the one you gave in the post, i.e. not owned by a publisher, the size of the studio and the budget.
So, for example, those studios you listed with about 20 employees I’d still consider indie, although pretty much on the edge of it. As for budget…. I don’t know which amount I’d draw the line in. This criteria is a lot more fuzzy to me.
And yes, I admit these criterias are entirely arbitrary. I also agree that the term indie nowadays has changed and diluted so much that is pretty much pointless.
I’d just rather worry about finding games that look interesting to me, playing them and having a good time then arguing over semantics.