I watched (in a second screen sort of way as I tended to some work) the Game Awards last night. I’m not interested in talking about what the ceremony means—it’s an obviously vapid affair—but the powerful sweeping of awards by Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was interesting to see. it also left me feeling a bit… odd.
Before I say anything, I wanna say that I’m happy for that team and think they made a very cool game. very little if anything I am writing here is a judgement on the game itself or the quality of the experience therein. It’s good! if you play it, I think you’ll have fun.
But while I’m often interesting in talking about games, I’m also interested in how we talk about games. This is what made Horses fascinating to me and it’s draw me out to write again. Because as the night went on and Geoff Keighley talked about the power of indie games like Expedition 33, I couldn’t help but feel a bit uncomfortable. Something felt off, y’know?
In watching Expedition 33 get subsumed into Keighley’s mainstream machine and the narrative picture he wanted to paint about 2025, I couldn’t help but frown. 2025 might be the year where indie games and alternative sub-genres outshine a flagging AAA space but I think we need to be honest about what drew Keighley to Expedition 33 and drove him to drag that game first and foremost into the narrative he was trying to build. Because when Geoff Keighley mentioned “indie games” what he really means to say is “indie games of a certain scale and aesthetic.” This is what many people mean!
So I want to talk about RPGs and I want to maybe talk about budgets and I want to talk about respectability. Because for as impressive a story I think Expedition 33, it hardly a mistake that the indie RPG that supposedly redeems the genre is one which, national identity or not, chases so hard after AAA games and Hollywood…
It’s interesting because the meaning of the word “independent” is shifting for games, in the same way it shifted for Hollywood movies.
Essentially one guy made Stardew Valley, and funded it himself. Most of the development of Clair Obscur was funded by a publisher, Kepler Interactive.
So… for games “independent” now means “not funded by one of the major game studios.” Not really “independent” as it used to mean. That’s too bad.
Yeah, I refuse to call anything ‘indie’ that is not in fact independent of a publisher. We already have A, AA, and AAA to denote budgets and scale. Rebranding ‘indie’ to mean ‘A’ or ‘AA’ games from third-party studios under a publisher is drinking the publisher kool-aid. Sony especially pushed this angle.
