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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)
I "love" how the word "indie" lost all meaning within the gaming industry.
No longer a Flash game made by a single dude with a few screws lose, no longer a game battling for attention on the third page of Steam made by a couple of millennials.
Now it's "Ubisoft's little secondary 200 person team" or "tee-hee a tiny cute studio that had enough capital to pay developers for 10 years before releasing the game".
indie never exclusively meant solo dev. indie only needs to mean no publisher investment and not the house studio of a publishing giant like ubi. the dev team fits in a VW bus
Nothing you just wrote contradicts my comment. It would be super weird for me to say indie means "solo dev" and then write an example of a couple developing a game. My two examples were an Ubisoft side studio and a large developer getting money from somewhere (hint: a publisher) before publishing a game.
The real indies are mods and other user-created content like custom maps and probably have always been.
The original Dota on WC3 is an indie game.
Project Diablo 2 is an indie game.
Fallout 1.5: Resurrection which chronologically takes place between Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 is an indie game.
A Pokemon romhack where you can catch every single Pokemon up til a given generation in a single game is an indie game.
Some random Doom WAD or custom SC2 map or Minecraft mod are all indie games.
Everything else is just marketing.