[COLUMN] The Term “Indie Game” Is Meaningless in 2023 | by Marty Sliva (Patreon)

Another November means another chance for everyone to gather around the warm glow of their phones and monitors to angrily chime in on the nominations for the extremely silly accreditation we call Game of the Year.

Earlier this week, Geoff Keighly dropped the list of games that will be up for various trophies at the annual Game Awards on December 7th. In a year as historically packed with beloved entries in some of the biggest and most-beloved franchises, it was clear that some things were going to get overlooked. While The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Baldur’s Gate 3 are heavy with nominations, other games like Octopath Traveler 2 and Pineapple on Pizza are sadly nowhere to be found. So yeah, a lot of the usual sentiment of “How could my personal opinion not be shared by others?!”

Honestly, there are a million different things you can say about this year’s crop of nominations and the format of the award show itself. Should the salvaging of Cyberpunk 2077 really be considered an Ongoing Game in the same way Apex Legends, Final Fantasy XIV, Fortnite, and Genshin Impact are? What does it say about our industry that Bungie was nominated for Best Community Support just a few weeks after laying off a large chunk of that very same community team? And will Geoff Keighley’s nemesis and sleep paralysis demon show up again?

But among all of that, I think the most interesting discussion revolves around the nominees for Best Independent Game, and the growing uselessness that the term “indie game” has in 2023.

The nominees in this year’s category include Cocoon, Dave the Diver, Dredge, Sea of Stars, and Viewfinder – five wonderful games, all of which are among my 25 or so favorites of 2023 (like I said, it’s been a pretty phenomenal year). I don’t think anyone is taking issue with any of these games being given awards for their quality. However, there’s been a lot of genuinely thoughtful pushback over Dave the Diver’s inclusion on this list, because it is quite literally not an indie game.

Despite looking and feeling like an independent game (that’s something we’ll get to in a bit), Dave the Diver is developed by Mintrocket, a subdivision of the multi-billion dollar South Korean publisher Nexon. It’s independent in the same way Assassin’s Creed Mirage is independent – it’s not. Just because Mirage was developed by a smaller team at Ubisoft Bordeaux, that doesn’t make it an indie game. Only 30 people or so worked on Dave the Diver, but team size isn’t the deciding factor in what is and isn’t indie.

Now let me be clear – none of this is a commentary on Dave the Diver’s merit as a game. I played the hell out of it this summer and loved every second of it. But if we’re giving out awards for excellence in independent gaming in the year 2023, having it included in the conversation is just plain silly. But I guess so is ranking one piece of art above another, but if we start digging into that, this whole house of cards comes crashing down.

The reason it’s being considered indie is because, like I mentioned before, it looks and feels indie. Its use of pixel art, a cozy atmosphere, and the simple-yet-addictive primary gameplay loop of exploring, gathering, and growing are things we’ve come to associate with a lot of indie games in recent years. And it’s in this past decade or so that it feels like we’ve really lost hold on the definition of indie game itself.

While stories of solo projects and Shareware sensations existed throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, it was Steam and digital distribution on both PC and consoles that led to the indie boom we saw in the ‘00s. Games like Cave Story, Super Meat Boy, Braid, and Limbo helped shine a major spotlight on the democratization of creativity. First parties started to take notice, with the rise of Xbox’s Summer of Arcade, PlayStation’s Pub Fun, and Nintendo’s Wiiware. Itch.io demolished the barrier to entry to find, share, and distribute indie games for free online. As AA studios shuttered and AAA budgets ballooned into AAAA, indie games rose to the occasion.

In the years since, indie publishers have grown to become familiar sights in nearly any big video game conference or showcase. If you’re watching an hour of new game trailers, chances are you’ll see something from Devolver, Annapurna, Humble, Thunderful, or any of the other big indie publishers. Of the nominees for this year’s Best Indie apart from Dave the Diver, Cocoon is published by Annapurna Interactive, Dredge by Team 17, and Viewfinder by Thunderful. Sea of Stars is self-published, but the team at Sabotage Studio clearly made deals with both Xbox and PlayStation, as the game launched simultaneously on Game Pass and PlayStation Plus. This shouldn’t negate any of their status as indie, but rather shows how varied these things can be on the spectrum.

But if you’re trying to stick to the literal definition of “independent game,” that’s where things start to get hazy. 2012’s Journey certainly feels like an indie game made by a small team with a singular vision. So does the fact that PlayStation helped out with funding and publishing mean it shouldn’t be considered in the same conversations as mostly-solo projects like Undertale or Stardew Valley? Hell, it feels like once games like those two reach a certain level of critical and financial success, they sort of enter a nebulous atmosphere all their own.

I remember people calling Ubisoft’s Child of Light an indie game, because it looked like less money was spent on it than their annual Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry games. Even earlier this year, I saw some folks calling Hi-Fi Rush an indie game, despite it being made by Tango Gameworks, which is a part of Bethesda Softworks, which is a part of Xbox Game Studios, which is part of Microsoft, which has the second-highest market cap of any company on the planet. So yeah, that one’s probably not an indie.

But I get it. Words are weird. They morph not just in their pronunciation and usage, but in their meaning as well. Language is a living thing that adapts and evolves with the times. Every generation hits a point where they need a translator for the next. Once literally became figuratively, all bets were off. Words are jazz, as some might say.

So the way we used the term “indie game” to describe Cave Story in 2004, or Gone Home in 2013, or Return of the Obra Dinn in 2018, or Sea of Stars in 2023 has changed with the times. And I’ll be the first to admit, I often use the term indie as a shorthand to represent a game made by a smaller team with a more bespoke focus and goal. While AAA feels like it needs to please the most amount of potential players as possible to recoup their staggering budgets, indies allow the creative thumbprints of their individual developers to shine through more clearly. From a gameplay perspective, The Binding of Isaac, Unpacking, A Short Hike, Super Hexagon, Device 6, and Outer Wilds don’t have anything in common. But I’d say there’s a similar ethos that went into their creation that “indie” can be an easy signifier of.

It’s a similar problem that “indie” movies and music have been running into for decades. For both, the term indie has become more of an aesthetic than a codifier of how the thing was funded and produced. Hell, when I hear the words “indie music,” I still think of Bon Iver, Death Cab for Cutie, and Vampire Weekend, aka, the holy trinity of shit I listened to during any breakup throughout the Obama administration.

Our pal Yahtzee has spoken at length about how genre names need to evolve alongside the medium itself, and I completely agree with him. Calling something “action-adventure” is kind of meaningless at this point, as genres spawn their own sub-genres which spawn their own sub-genres. Some of his suggestions have really caught on (spectacle fighter), others have their dedicated fans (ghost train rides), and others probably won’t be becoming a Steam genre anytime soon (I’m not sure if this is how you spell spunkgargleweewee, and I’m not going to look it up).

That said, I don’t mind using a broad term like metroidvania or soulslike as a quick way of getting a basic idea across. If I’m outside and someone walks up to me asking for directions, the first thing I’ll do before opening my mouth is to point which way they’ll need to go. But the important thing is that after that initial vague gesture, I use my words to further explain that you’ll want to head that way for a block, take a right at the light, and then you’ll see the coffee shop just up ahead on your left. Using “metroidvania” and “soulslike” gets your head pointed in the right direction, which creates a nice foundation for the more specific description.

It’s clear that video games have quickly outgrown the basic language we use to describe and categorize them. And I’m not entirely sure what we can do about that on a broader level that doesn’t just cater to small groups using their own niche terms. But a good first step might be collectively deciding what being an independent game actually means, because if a team inside of a multi-billion dollar company can be considered independent, then the term no longer has any use.

At the end of the day, the conversation around this just highlights that we should be more cognizant of how games are made, the kinds of teams behind them, and where the funding comes from. Not because that impacts the quality of said game, but rather it helps us have more informed criticism and conversations surrounding them. It’s wild how often I see completely uninformed takes on Twitter and YouTube go viral and become a constant talking point for thousands of people, despite having no basis in reality. Words might be jazz, but knowledge is power.

Oh, I couldn’t find a place that made sense to put this list, but here are a bunch of rad games that may or may not be indies that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed over the past year or two, and think you might as well – Cocoon, In Stars and Time, World of Horror, Void Stanger, Dredge, Chants of Sennaar, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Lunacid, Pizza Tower, Humanity, No Sun to Worship, Orbo’s Odyssey, Mosa Lina, Lone Fungus, Pseudoregalia, 24 Killers, Vividlope, Babbdi, Signalis, Neon White, Immortality, Haiku the Robot, Lil Gator Game, Tunic, Tinykin, Stray, Islets, Infernax, and Frogun. Can’t forget Frogun.