96
Oh those guys? Yeah those are just the dozens of professional voice actors we could afford to hire with our tiny baby game studio budget! And those guys? Yeah that's just our 7-person "engineering" team. What do you mean your entire studio is 4 people?
suck off me
(for the record I'm not dunking on Hades or Hades 2 as a game this is just something that pisses me (and I assume only me) off)
It's the same as people calling stuff on major labels (or subsidiaries of majors) "indie music" lol
I guess the sheer scale of AAA development makes 133 people look like a small team
it's probably a mistake to think of all those contract hires as "the dev team". the marketing guys are absolutely not developers. working on the retail product isn't the same as working on the game.
I'm not calling them the development team, but it doesn't change the fact that 133 people contributed to this pretty large game. They had the budget to hire all these people for translating, voice acting, marketing, legal, accounting etc
we talk about indie developers not indie localization and marketing
they could make the game only in english and take like 100 people off of those credits.
even slay the spire was made by two guys, a contracted composer, a contracted 2d artist, QA'ed and playtested by a bunch of people, and localized by a bunch of people.
The problem with music labels is that, in the US, only 34% of the industry is independent, so as an artist you have way less freedom. Continuing to call music that has the vibe of independent music indie when it isn't at least makes some sense because it's not like artists have that much of a choice.
But with game studios, super small ones (and even solo devs) have put out hit indie games repeatedly, and there's an even stronger aversion toward "AAA slop" from consumers, so being indie is both more viable and more appealing. The problem is that now we got a studio like Supergiant that, in a better world, would probably be one of the biggest game studios in the planet, claiming to be an indie studio. That now raises the bar for what an indie game should be, in the mind of consumers a small indie studio can (and, therefore due to market forces, should) be putting out these massive games with dozens of fully voice acted characters with thousands of lines of dialogue.
At this point “indie” music just means “the music that doesn’t get heavy rotation on the top 40 pop stations”
Or "alternative" music lol. Fortunately, I'm not elder Millennial/Gen X enough to care