The world of indie gaming started out small, but over the years, the industry has ballooned to heights of popularity never previously imagined. As of the writing of this post, two of the top 20 best selling games of all time are in the independent category, those being Stardew Valley and Terraria; three if you still count Minecraft. My question inadvertently is: do you count Minecraft? What counts as an indie game, and what doesn’t? Hell, let’s take it one step further and ask: what even IS an indie game?
It may come to surprise you that, despite the category having been around for decades by this point, there is still no general consensus for the definition of an “indie game”. Some say a game is indie if it is self-published, which very easily breaks today to the existence of indie game publishers. Others may call a game indie if it was developed by a small team over their own budget, which again falls under scrutiny if you even do so much as think about the definition of a “small team”. Many, though? They call games “indie” based on vibes alone, as though indie games are something that you feel —— a “you know it when you see it” type of mentality, which, while for the most part true today, is on the whole unproductive, regressive, and harmful for the industry.
Where The “Indie Vibe” Comes From
Independent video games are often associated with uniqueness, innovation, and a lo-fi / mid fidelity aesthetic, which come together to form what I call the “indie vibe”, but these qualities came from two facts about indie development. The first reason is straightforward: indie games are not developed by big budget studios who can afford many artists and developers, which almost always necessitates that they pursue a lo-fi art style. While game development companies scrap and scramble for the latest and hottest technology to give their games glossier and glossier exteriors, indie developers look to find their strength elsewhere knowing they can’t compete with AAA in terms of realism. In this sense, they are able to focus on making the game polished, unique, and enjoyable given their limited time and budget.
Secondly, because indie games are not developed by companies with a certain level of returns in mind (which typically comes in the form of monetary profit), indie games are much more free to experiment and attempt new concepts or design philosophies without fear of imperfection, which easily sets them apart from the AAA product. The corporate AAA product, on the other hand, is built upon market research, industry standard methodologies, and conglomerated philosophies which make them feel incredibly by-the-book and afraid of experimentation. Of course, this is not to say that AAA games cannot and have not been of quality; they kind of have to be, as is expected with anything that follows well-studied principles. The AAA gaming industry as a whole is all about formulating trends and following them precisely to amass as large a playerbase as a product can, and what follows is a difference in the way these two categories of games view their player, in which one sees the player as a consumer of its product, and the other as a viewer of its art.
It is exactly in this independence from formulaic trends, powered by total creative freedom away from a financial purpose, that the popularized indie vibe is found. But the conflation between “independence from formulaic trends” and “independence from corporate objectives” is also exactly the problem in this modern viewpoint of an indie game. Many see the former as the main defining factor of an indie game — thus, people mistakenly believe that “indie” embodies a sort of aesthetic, a sort of vibe. The thing is, this is not a matter of chicken and eggs; clearly, the creative freedom of independent developers came first, and the aesthetic of indie games followed, but instead of applying this line of thinking, many simply and inaccurately associate the aesthetic of indie games and the way they break away from trends as indicative of an independent development setup, even when that’s really not the case.
The Dave the Diver Incident
Anything in life is possible, except going twenty sentences regarding the categorization of an indie game without mentioning the “Dave the Diver Incident”. If you have not been following the Game Awards recently — which I wouldn’t exactly be surprised by — you may have missed Mintrocket’s Dave the Diver being nominated for the “Best Independent Game” award during The Game Awards 2023. There is only one slight problem with this nomination: Dave the Diver is not an indie game. It is developed and published by Mintrocket, which itself is a sub-brand of Nexon, a large Korean game development company which has over 7,000 employees and ~100 billion dollars of net worth. It goes without saying that Dave the Diver is not an indie game, because even if only a small fraction of those employees and revenue went into making and funding it, it clearly still had all the resources you might associate with a AAA title, as well as, indeed, the goal of accruing sales, with the game debuting as the fifth-best seller in Steam. Now, the false nomination of Dave the Diver is not necessarily the fault of The Game Awards or of one particular gaming media outlet which nominated it; instead, it highlights a global issue when it comes to the perception and understanding of indie games, which is that no one knows what the hell an indie game is.
Dave the Diver was likely nominated for the reason that I discussed earlier, in that it was chosen out of vibe — out of the thinking that the aesthetic precedes the development categorization, out of the thinking that creative freedom precedes the definition, and not the other way around. Let me remind you that it is because indie games are independent from corporate control that they can display vast amounts of creativity, but a game is not indie just because it displays creativity. These two facts are not mutually interchangeable, and Dave the Diver, no matter how The Game Awards’ executive producer Geoff Keighley puts it, is not an indie game.
This still begs the question, though: why does Dave the Diver feel like an indie game? Indie games still do have a certain feel to them which Dave the Diver manages to capture even with its sizeable team of developers. Truthfully, Dave the Diver is no isolated case, and every once in a while one can and one does find something special within these big AAA titles, especially when the drivers behind the wheel are passionate creators.
AAA Artists Are Still Artists . . .
Do not let this post give you the idea that game developers and artists working in the AAA industry are not creative, much less passionate. Often, they have just as much drive as independent developers do. At the end of the day, artists working in big game development companies are still that, artists. They still want to see their vision come to fruition and their dreams come to life, and when enough of a team has that same fiery drive, miracles can easily happen. Why do you think Valve has stayed at the top of their game, even when they can’t seem to finish trilogies? Why do you think Nintendo has given so many critically acclaimed games, even if they don’t follow the same practices many other companies do? Behind it all are still individuals with creative minds, who are able to weave the strings of their art into fine silk clothing, and so long as this thread remains uncompromised, beauty in the corporate could still come through.
. . . But AAA is Not Indie
The problem is that this beauty almost never comes through. AAA games often show a lack of creativity because the very mindset that the industry is built upon does not have anything to do with beauty. “Beauty in the corporate” as a phrase is paradoxical at best, and heretical at worst, because when the art is recontextualized into a product, everything about it is optimized and streamlined and studied and formalized. Creativity is all about breaking formulas and going outside of boxes, but when doing that is actively discouraged for fear of straying from the goal of monetary profit — which may I remind you is certainly the main objective of these companies — it is not exactly easy for creativity to come through. Humans are creative, and that creativity is and can be reflected in these corporatized works, but when the core of the system incentivizes fulfilling investments over risks, it matters not how many of these talented creatives you can get in one team; any game they make will never be independent. Throw as much silk as you want to a spider, but if you’ve only taught it how to make a web, don’t expect it to make fashion.
My Definition of an Indie Game
So what does it really mean to be an independent video game? If you’ve been an astute reader, you may have noticed my word choice throughout this post, noticing my referring to indie games as a “category”, not a “genre”. To call indie games a “genre” implies a certain set of qualities or properties only specific to the category, when, in actuality, indie games can be whatever the hell they want. To me, for a video game to be independent, it matters not its independence from preset boundaries, but instead what matters is its independence from the corporate mindset and from the maximization of profits. The indie mindset is to view gaming as an artform, capable of conveying emotions and ideas and scenes perhaps no other media can provide, and utilizing those to their fullest advantage, and not as a product whose sole purpose is to be packaged and sold. However, this can only be fulfilled if the art itself is free from the “profit-first” mind, polluting the AAA scene.
The Consequences
I, by no means, claim that my definition is a good one, and I am discreetly aware that not only is it a vague definition, it’s hard (if not completely impossible) to distinguish the intent of a development studio when making a game. A good place is to start is by determining how big the studio and its company is, but even that is not so simple. But the fact of the matter is that we desperately need a definition of some kind, or at least some change, or to ditch the term altogether. Because otherwise? We get another Dave the Diver situation.
Zack Daniels in his 2023 blog post stated that the misrepresentation of indie developers puts them at an uncomfortably high pedestal, thus putting their craft at equally high levels of expectation, without even considering the difference in how the games are being made. Some twenty or so talented artists working on something like Hades as their full-time job is not at all the same as one person in their bedroom working on their passion project every other day, and yet, somehow, these two groups of people are expected to make the same kind of game. The term “AA” has been used in some situations like these, but the term has yet to catch on, and even then, it still only serves to blur the line further.
To confine such a wide and broad category of gaming into predisposed traits would be to confine the core ideology that the category is built upon, which is in fact what we see right now. Through the incessant and mindless redefinition of indie games into one specific, “you know it when you see it” vibe, even developers themselves are misled into thinking that their games have to follow a certain prescribed aesthetic, and that their games have to fit the mold, even when there is no mold that needs to be fit into in the first place.
Developers all across the board are already struggling to fill their wallets and/or live comfortably, so I don’t think it is right to treat independent developers even more harshly than they deserve. Sure, a few of the brightest minds in this category of gaming have made it big, but the vast, vast majority of indie developers are not nearly as lucky. This post is not just a call to support all developers, especially those in the indie space, but it is also a suggestion for readers to reconsider the way they think about indie games and the scene as a whole.
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