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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)
never said anything about games being cheap to make lmao, just that when you have a publisher funding and publishing your game for you like with E33, you're literally not an indie creation
It's definitely a fuzzy divide. Kepler seems to have a cooperative ownership model and leaves the studio with a lot of creative freedom.
I feel like securing funding will always be necessary, but if you can maintain creative control over the project after getting the bag you could still be considered independent.
A larger corporate production company would absolutely be constantly making changes from the C-Suite
if it's a fuzzy divide for whether a game is independent when it's by a developer that didn't publish their own game, got millions of dollars of outside funding, and hired another ~~studio~~ team to help them make the game, I feel like the word indie has completely become meaningless. where is the independence here?
I think it's just a question of what they're independent from. Independent can mean solo/on your own or free from something else.
Like I can independently do something, or I can gain independence from my parents which are both describing separate actions.
I've always read "Independent X" as the latter, but I could be wrong
is Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 an indie game?
It's a game made by an independent studio with a small team compared to most games that it's competing with. "Indie Game" is a more specific term than "Independent Studio/Developer" I think. Mainly because of that movie that focused primarily on solo dev projects.
I'm just happy when studios can get no strings funding and are allowed to make what they want really. I think most solo projects should also qualify for grant funding too.
This whole argument happens in music too, I try to stay consistent and just allow the independent moniker for any artist that manages to either secure funding outside official industry channels, or fully self fund.
Sidenote: This is one of the most reasonable struggle sessions I've ever seen on this site lol. I'm also definitely off the opinion that we don't really have good terminology for this stuff yet since it's all pretty new.
i preciate you not answering whether you consider Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 an indie game or not, but on top of that no lmao, if a musician gets multiple millions of dollars of outside funding and has their music published by a third party you're not gonna catch me calling their work indie music
the usual official industry channels thing doesn't work for E33 either because it was funded by both microsoft and netease