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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)
They didn't hire an Korean studio, they hired a team of 8 freelance Korean animators. The lead animator having never been credited in a professional video game before. The lead animator also said in an interview that he was working part time on E33 remotely while still full time at his day job in SK. It's not like they found an established animation studio who was OK with redacting their studio's name in the game's credits.
I think the confusion came from an article earlier this year where a website reported that the combat animations were done by an "eight-person Korean 'gameplay animation' team" which people have taken to mean like a Korean Pixar or something bigger than what it was.
I mean it's still not "smol bean indie devs" like some people believe but they also didn't have the budget to get an actual studio with history and priors
my bad, i thought it was an eight-person studio instead of an eight-person team they hired, i've edited the comment
Yeah, I saw in an interview. The game director found the lead animator while scrolling YouTube reels where he found videos of this Korean guy showing off some of his 3D rendering work he made in his spare time, and he asked him to work on E33. The animator said he had a full time job and couldn't move to France, they went on with him just working part time around his day job. As the project grew larger in scope and acquired more funding, then hired a few other Korean animators, friends and hobbyists, none of them worked on the project full time either, they all worked on it as a side gig (although some of them do work for legitimate studios)
It just so happens this probably saved the studio like a half a million Euros compared to an 8 person, full time, established animation studio with all the additional expenses that requires. It's kind of amazing how well done the animations are for something led by a guy who fucks around in Blender in his off time and posts it to his YouTube channel.
I'd say it's indie. The vibes of how it came to be are extremely indie. High budget indie, sure, but Ubisoft or Blizzard aren't outsourcing to hobbyists they found on Youtube, they outsource to proper studios or have an in house team. Plus their publisher is a co-op, so while there was a lot of funding from outside sources (moreso than basically every other indie game in existence) it's kind of a weird place. There should be a new term for it. High budget indie? What Star Citizen wishes it was.
their publisher is not a co-op, and first and foremost they have a publisher that gave them millions of dollars
we already have a term for it, it's called an AA game
AA is such a broad stroke in that it's began as a definition for "not AAA nor Indie". It's as well defined as AAAA (like that terrible Ubisoft pirate game). It doesn't address the differences in development cycle, production value and most of all: quality. Kepler is not a co-op in our sense (it's not worker owned), but it's definitely comprised of actual indie developers. If the money you're getting is funded by a dozen indie publishers pooling their money together, does that disqualify you from being "indie"? I'd say sort of, not really, but kind of. Furthermore, flagship games from big companies have their low effort titles also described as AA. "Final Fantasy XXIX: Final-er", "Kingdom Hearts IV: Revenge of the Goof", "Hearthstone II: Moneysink". But those would be completely different. It's not a meaningful category, outside of pricing tiers at checkout.
Like, yeah, they had funding from a publisher, which I get makes it not a true "indie" game in the spiritual sense, but it's far from "Call of Duty XXII: Current Year Warfare" or "Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour: The Game" or whatever they're coming up with next.
If your funding comes from a syndicate of indie studios pooling their resources together, I don't think it's the same as having your funding come from Microsoft or Sony shareholders even if the $ amount works out to be the same, because the strings attached aren't the same. Which is why I think there should be a separate term. Larian developed and self published Baldur's Gate III, and it feels weird to call that an indie game.
Something like Vampyr or Disco Elysium or E33 also don't feel like an indie game, nor really have the vibes of AA. Which is why I'm saying there should be a different term for it. Am I making sense? Or did I categorize things differently based purely off vibes?
lmaooo no, Kepler is mostly funded by NetEase, they laundered 120 mil for venture capital and is 99% of the reason they were even able to give millions to Sandfall. Real collection of "indie developers" when fellow shareholder NetEase is sitting at the table with you
E33 was funded by Microsoft, that's what the game pass deal was
Baldur's Gate III is an AAA indie game, simple as