It doesn’t mean different things if you use a dictionary thou…
I’m not really independent if someone spots me a million dollars to do what I wanna do.
It loses a bit in translation from the original Doritos Pope Language. I believe what he said was, “Games? Money! Hype marketing ad revenue, corporate sponsorship “awards” money.”. Though my DPL is a bit rough these days.
I feel like “independent” would mean a team independent of any major publisher or financing. They should rename the category best “indie” game which might have a bit more room for interpretation. Also I guess Pentiment is an independent game.
Yup, Genshin Impact, Honkai Impact 3rd, and Honkai Star Rail are all technically indie games since Mihoyo/Hoyoverse are an independent studio who publish their own games
Valerian the City of a Thousand Planets is technically an independent film despite the $200 million dollar budget. Same thing would apply to games, I think.
This event is a joke. I was looking at the 30 games available to vote at Player’s Voice and there was 0 indie games in there. But you know what? I can vote for genshin, apex, and all those online bullshit. It’s all about popularity, marketing. It’s all about money.
Agree
And thus, your third eye is open.
It’s all about money. Always has been. Always will be.
Lol studios don’t buy their way into the game awards, and anyone who thinks they do are deluding themselves.
It’s literally just people at various gaming outlets getting ballots and voting for what they think should win in whatever category.
That’s why only the biggest games get on there. It’s not because they paid to be there. It’s because those are the most known, most popular, and most widely liked games that people have played.
And Geoff will never say anything bad about the games industry because he wants to remain buddy-buddy with everyone in the industry.
Like, I get his show is suppose to be a celebration of video-games, but just how blatant all the awful shit in gaming gets ignored (MTX, live-service, unfinished launches, etc) just kinda looks silly at this point.
Imagine. People picking popular stuff. Crazy.
There’s no need to take it seriously, enjoy the trailers, the live music, enjoy seeing voice/performance actors being celebrated.
I don’t take it seriously, but you know that they can do better than that. Games that released in 2023 should get praise, not live service games that didn’t even release that year.
Like, why should these games be able to compete in player’s voice instead of so many other highly acclaimed games in 2023? How can anyone “celebrate” the industry like you said when they themselves don’t take the awards seriously, what you’re doing is celebrating games from the big publishers and the biggest live service games at the moment, not the industry, but the rich people in it.
He wanted to make a big glitzy award show like the Oscars because he (and many other people in games media) desperately want gaming to be seen as relevant or artistic or mainstream or whatever and in order to make a big glitzy award show he needed a ton of money so he just made the show one big series of ads.
The Game Developer’s Choice Awards have been going since 2000. While not all of their choices are agreed on, they are a group of game developers in the industry who answer to no advertisers. So we already have an Oscars and the Doritto king is not part of it.
Indie does not mean independent in the current interpretation of the word. It means small dev team with a small budget.
If indie just means independent then Cyberpunk 2077 is an indie game.
What the actual funk are you talking about cp2077 is indie. lol
No the fuck it doesn’t.
Nexon is the reason dark and darker isn’t on steam anymore, they are VERY predatory and will sue actual indie devs and forcefully take the games.
Sounds like the same bullshit rhetoric people use with the term remake today. Words and terms have meanings, and very rarely over decades do they change meaning.
Getting tired of Geoff ngl
Look at an Indie Band and you know what an Indie Game is.
Should be the same as independent or craft breweries in the US. There’s a legal definition to do with amount of beer produced and sold, which if goes above a certain threshold it can’t legally be called craft beer. Common sense the same goes for games, if it’s a large company making huge amounts of money then it clearly isn’t independent. Though large companies want to have that prestige and good will that goes towards smaller companies, so will do things like set up fake smaller companies and pretend they’re independent. Don’t be a fool and fall for it.
Dave the diver drives debate is one hell of a sentence
I think there’s indie and indie-like which maybe would mean a game with a smaller budget focusing on creativity and gameplay ideas.
For me an independent game’s definition is quite straightforward, it doesn’t mean creative freedom, pixel art or cel shading, it means not backed by something like Nexon.
Now if they want to include more games than independent, they could rename it to “small team”, “indie style” etc but for 2023 it’s sadly too late to correct it
Can’t wait until we also introduce indie-lite
Back in my day indie meant independently funded and/or independently published.
It still does and it makes me laugh (as a true indie dev studio) that we have to still pretend some of these games are indie.
I don’t get the obsession tbh. Liking a game is liking a game it’s that simple. You don’t have to go searching for reasons the game is indie because that means you’re ‘allowed’ to enjoy it.
I’ve seen too many people say ‘indie games are so good’ and then say they mean BG3 and Elden Ring.
Then baldurs gate 3 would sweep it and not let anyone have the chance to compete
There should be “Indie” (what we’ve come to expect indie is like Dave the Diver and other similar ‘cozy’ games) and then “Independent” which are truly from small studios or solo dev teams
I think the spirit of games classification of AAA l, AA and indie comes from the expectations of the game.
Those expectations being generally:
Marketing dollars > Graphical fidelity > scope.
AAAs have all three in spades. AAs might have great graphics, but usually they’re just decent. But they usually have great scope. Indies have no marketing dollars, low budgets for graphics, generally smaller scopes.
If you define a game by its budget and maximum team size throughout development that metric would capture all the attributes here because each one costs money.
Then we can unchain the backroom deals on the funding of these games. It’s mostly irrelevant to the spirit of the game.