During a Q&A session ahead of this year's Game Awards, host Geoff Keighley was asked to comment on Dave the Diver’s inclusion in the Best Indie Game category, despite it being produced by a studio 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:owned by billion dollar corp Nexon. Keighley’s answer to the question essentially boils down to ‘the jury decides which games are indie’. With so much ambiguity around the distinction between what should and shouldn't be considered an indie game, TGA’s position is to go with the consensus - a consensus seemingly based entirely on vibes.

That's a problem, as the lack of clear categorical separation diminishes the identity and purpose of the category. To his credit, Keighley does a good job of explaining why it isn't an easy problem to solve. Indie means different things to different people. The most literal definition - games that are funded, created, and published by an independent studio - would, as Kotaku, disqualify every game in the category except Sea of Stars. It may, however, allow Baldur’s Gate 3, although Tencent’s stake in Larian complicates that.

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In the Q&A, Keighley also mentions Journey, a game that won many Best Indie awards, was published by Annapurna Interactive and Sony. Games are funded in a wide variety of ways, and many of the best indie games would not exist if it were not for big publishers and platform holders supporting them. The only reason you've even heard of this year’s Best Indie games is largely thanks to the marketing budget behind them, which comes from publishers with deep pockets (though it's worth remembering that publishers are often guilty of extracting expenses from studios’ profits). The great indies going under the radar are the ones without the means to sell themselves to the jury, who at their vast size, mostly represent the average player, not the trained palate of a tastemaking critic.

So we're left with a vibe-based system to determine whether or not a game is indie. Indie just means the opposite of triple-A to most people, and genre and aesthetic play the biggest factor in qualifying a game as an indie. Pixel art turn-based RPGs, 2D Metroidvanias, and isometric roguelikes are all indie-coded. Short, personal games are categorized separately from sprawling open-world RPGs using a label that's meant to distinguish between how games were made, not what the final product feels like. A category designed to give visibility to and celebrate the challenge and achievement of making games with extraordinarily limited resources is compromised when anything can be included, so long as it's advertised as ‘cozy’ or ‘retro-inspired’.

Indie Just Means Games That Look Like This

How can we maintain the integrity of the indie label when so many treat indie as an aesthetic? The solution might be to look towards the film industry in this case. While most things are not transferable between industries, the Independent Spirit Awards have specific eligibility requirements for indies that could apply to games as well. One of them, and the one that would be the easiest to imp🍰lement for The Game Awards, is a budget restriction.

The Independent Spirit Awards have budget limits for several categories. For the Best Feature category, the budget can't exceed $22.5 million. There are other requirements, including the requirement that a large percentage of a film's budget must come from somewhere other than a major studio, but the budget restriction would be the easiest one for the game industry to adopt.

One of my favorite indies this year is Slay the Pไrincess, developed and self-publishꦉed by indie studio Black Tabby Games.

For a variety of reasons, game studios are typically not as transparent about budgets as movie studios are. And while movie studios are rarely honest about the total size of their budgets, they're never overestimating what they spend. If a game wants to be nominated for the indie category, it should have to make its budget public, and there should be a clear eligibility requirement for both indie categories.

This doesn't entirely solve the problem. Sony, Nexon, and other massive publishers will continue to publish indies with small budgets, and I don't entirely think it's unfair for those small dev teams to earn accolades for that work. But there needs to be some kind of line drawn that designates an indie so we can stop going purely on vibes. Treating indie like an aesthetic does not benefit anyone in the long run, and giving the term some structure would go a long way.

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