Seems we're having the annual debate about what counts as an indie game again. (Must've been some kind of awards show last night...?) So, from atop my tallest soapbox I say, "indie" doesn't mean anything anymore and we should stop using it.
Like, maybe we can talk about "games made by small teams" or "games made with a small budget" ... assuming we can agree on what counts as "small."
Or maybe we could talk about "games made with creative freedom without interference from external stakeholders." Is that even possible? The last stakeholder is always the player. There aren't many games created without even a small hope that someone might play it. (Not many, but perhaps not zero.)
So what distinction should we make then? I dunno! Maybe it's just vibes? Seems like that's how people judge it. What get's called "indie" seems to be creative work that wants to push away from the mainstream and sit outside of it on purpose. That's an admiral goal, I guess! Especially if it's in service of some kind of point. A social good of some kind maybe. A fundamentally anticapitalist streak. But if that's the case, if "indie" a set of themes, or a style, or a vibe, then we should probably not use it as a category in award shows or any other supposedly serious distinction.
Because that always makes it seem like a lower tier. Like divisions in a league. Maybe we could put a Cocoon, a Sea of Stars, a Viewfinder, or a Dredge, or even smaller projects, games made by one to five people with zero budget, in the same list as the Alan Wake 2s and the Baldurs Gate 3s and say, "these aren't different types of thing or inherently lesser. They're the same type of thing, but they can be good in different ways." That might even encourage big corps to put their money into smaller teams. And we won't need to argue what "indie" means - we can just bin it.
Anyway, this is actually just an excuse for me to post Strongbad, who already covered this. (Applies well to games.) https://youtu.be/kjwlrvcKcfI
