Discussion about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 being an indie game are ongoing leading into The Game Awards. And nobody can agree where to land on it.
Cold take: The indie, AA, AAA, and the one “AAAA” labels are all pretty poor.
I agree with this, except I thought “indie” was the one that made the most sense until now.
Hollywood redefined “independent” to mean “anything outside of the major studio system,” which has made less and less sense as time goes on.
Seems like it was about time for the video game industry to redefine words too!
I’ve never even seen anyone use “AA”, anyway.
But yeah, it seem obvious that we need different definitions for games that were made with few resources. I do think that it’s worth treating something that was actually made independently, like Baldur’s Gate 3, different from a game by EA or Ubisoft, but it’s pretty absurd to have these huge games compete against games that were made by a team of 5 on a shoestring budget.
A lot of “AA games” get lumped into as indie because they’re small studios. Satisfactory and Valheim are both published by Coffee Stain which generates more than half a billion in revenue every year, but usually when people think of big publishers they think of the mega large ones like Sony, EA, Ubisoft, etc.
The publisher relationship is different now than it was 20 years ago, but its still a different scenario to be publisher backed than solely self-funded indie.
I’d argue AA is still a valid label for small studio but still publisher backed games, even if that category is a little murky.
I thought it was just a rehash of the Baldur’s Gate 3 discussion, but apparently Clair Obscur is even further removed from what is considered typical for indie games:
The other part of this was the concern over Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 being published by Kepler Interactive. Sandfall Interactive was able to have a partnership with Kepler and gain resources to grow the team and secure funding for various parts of development. This includes bringing on Hollywood talent like Charlie Cox for voice acting. To many people, this stepped out of bounds for what the spirit of being an indie game was, because of how the game was not self-published and had access to vast resources through another entity. Some pointed to similar examples of games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Hollow Knight Silksong having similar scenarios, but both of those titles were still self-published by Larian Studios and Team Cherry respectively, despite gaining access to funds in their own ways that didn’t involve a publisher.
Clair Obscur is not an indie game. Dave the Diver was not an indie game (it was developed by Nexon ffs!).
The term is vague yes but surely we can do better than this?
Absolutely not.
