Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
Rules
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)
In australia a small business can have up to 500 employees. I worked at a small business where the owner had 7 stores across the city. It's all wank.
Weird post tbh
OP's an indie dev tired of petit bourgeois companies stealing valor. normal post, find a new slant
29 people and some contractors with no publisher like take two/EA/microsoft/whatever is indie and always has been. find a new slant.
Wait, in what sense is a company like Super Giant Games petty boug?
the first 29 people are the actual company. debatably the "contributors", but everybody after that starting with the "Animated Trailers" guys are freelance.
"independent" just means
Publishers
Supergiant Games, Inc.
Developers
Supergiant Games, Inc.
it's not a budget constraint. If the fuckhead who made minecraft took his pile of money and funded a AAA-budget and scale game it would still be independent
My favorite indie game
It's all vibes based I'm afraid. Featherless biped with flat nails moment
sorry. the implied part of that is that supergiant, megacrit, etc don't operate a publishing arm.
Do you want 15-20 people with no skill in acting to voice a hundred different characters?
I'm legitimately not sure how anyone can say the development team isn't indie when it's that small, voice actors are not developers and aren't really part of "the studio" are they?
They are though, for the purposes of classification. Tiny teams can't afford this stuff and go without things like like polished VA.
A game on the scale of hades 2 can't be achieved by an indie dev, that's fine. Supergiant found success and grew, now they can make games with a level of polish and scope Indies can't achieve.
Good for them! Good for us!
But they do this level of polish with voice actors and music since Bastion, their first game. Logan Cunningham and Darren Korb are part of Supergiant.
Bastion was a much more limited game and reflects their status as actually indie at the time.
Indie doesn't mean low quality, it's about resources that's all.
IIRC SuperGiant makes a point of actually hiring their VAs full-time so it's easier to involve them in the development. Which to me is even more reason to not shit on that studio, most VAs are treated like garbage by the industry
no, this is people who don't know how dev works confusing the game for the retail product and a whole pile of non-dev work that goes into a retail product.
OP is a game dev, albeit for much smaller games that lack some of the considerations that Hades has.
solo dev is wildly different from an indie studio. the post title is literally inaccurate.
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.
reminds me of when people called expedition 33 an indie game made by 30 people when they had a parent company give them millions of dollars and publish their game, and they hired a Korean ~~studio~~ team of freelance animators to do their combat animations (which is like half of the game itself right there)
the word indie has been overused to pointlessness, it means about as much as the word "roguelike" does now lmao
Glitch apparently spends upwards of $500k-$1M per episode of their shows. I'd still consider them mostly independent. Turns out that creative products that take years to make can be expensive.
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
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
~20 people on fulltime payroll is still really small. 100 contractors for assets and voiceover and translation is normal. Put it's not like they're being paid a wage, just a contract rate for the work they do.
You aren't even considered a business in the US until you have 50 full time employees.
You aren't even considered a business in the US until you have 50 full time employees.
What? You're a small business with <50 workers, but there's plenty of petit bourgeois that own small businesses.
wasn’t expecting a struggle sessions about what constitutes an indie dev studio today, hexbear is such a hilarious combination of extremely serious and deeply unserious.
I don’t really have anything to add other than, yes, SuperGiant is an indie development company, and the fact they’ve taken (some of) their extra money from the massive commercial success that was Hades and used it to pay contractors is actually really fucking cool and admirable.
There a mods for Doom, Skyrim, etc. where 20+ people are involved. Anyone claiming that "a studio with more than 5 people isn't indie" is just clueless.
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.
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.
I think this is more a result of the industry largely getting rid of the "AA" label for games, games can be small budget/team "A" games/Indie games, or they can be massive multi-million dollar AAA games made by massive studios with hundreds and hundreds of employees. There isn't really the middle ground "small studios, but not really "indie" studios" anymore.
I seem to remember Bethesda (Game Studios) having a total of 100 developers while working on Skyrim and Fallout 4. I think after 4 they opened a new studio to work on 76, and I think Bethesda now has around 300 people. Don't ask where I'm getting these numbers from, they're in my brain for some reason.
Games are just so fucking big these days and it's exhausting
"Indie" had been adopted to mean anything not AAA, because "AA/A/B studio" sounds rude. Which is silly, because B level studios have produced some real bangers and fill/ed important niches. Even if a game ends up with 100+ devs, if the studio WAS indie, its 'indie' forever (at this point). Something like Paradox ain't indie anymore, but good luck relaying that broadly.
Similar thing happened to "roguelike". First it meant low-graphic gameplay/storytelling focused RPGs. Then people added "permadeath" to the defining features. Then it just meant permadeath, or "hard", or "has multi-run progression". Now people call Balatro a roguelike. People tried to adopt roguelite, but 1. sounds too similar, and 2. language will be used how it is understood, not how some of us want it to.
Or like how CRPG literally means "computer rpg", which sounds like it could fit practically any rpg, but actually means a specific style of rpg.
Semi-related example: "friendslop" has been coined to mean "multiplayer coop semi-casual progression game". People (who understand the jargon) immediately know what you mean when you say it now. Its goofy and kinda bad, but it works so it'll be hard to stop it from becoming THE genre name.
Basically, yeah its annoying. Yeah its "wrong"/"bad". But its sorta impossible to stop without going the Fr*nch route of having a word-use decider (even then I've seen a lot of younger French largely ignore it). Especially in a living language adapting to a (sorta) new thing. It irked/irks me because I like the idea of words/language having a clear and logical meaning. But I've been killing the redditor urge to go "Uhm actually" and its been pretty good for me personally.
idk i think the AA thing went away when midway games and all the other studios that size couldn't keep the doors open.
i think, really, a lot of it is translators and voice actors (its plausibly more than 60 people - voice for each character in each language, plus 1-2 translators), check the credits yourself, i think nine sols, for example, had like 10 devs, the credits still took 10 minutes with kickstarter backers/translators (cause you just see same names in editing/world design/character animations/physics, something i would think would be disentangled in big games)
(additionally even volunteer translation into relatively tiny language, which indies sometimes do, still merits a credit, that's probably for hades like 20 people for euro languages, cause it's so popular)
do be sad they caught sequel-itis
You will play the muscle mommy wizard basketball game and you will like it.
Stardew Valley and ConcernedApe are 'small developers'.
Hades 2 is not. thank you for coming to my Ted talk.
30 is really small. solo dev is a separate other thing and not a requirement for "indie". hell a solo dev can even remortgage their house and hire actors, localizers, and marketing, that doesn't make them not a solo dev.
even without that kind of ill-advised gambling a solo dev is almost certainly benefitting from unpaid playtesters and QA
If you start going beyond like 5 people + maybe a few bits of contract work it gets real iffy imho. Indie is meant to highlight that it's a game whiched faced considerable talent and resource limitations. A way of highlighting contributions that are either outsider, idiosyncratic, passion projects, experimental, or friends and a dream garage band style stuff.
The label indie explains and excuses a lack of polish. You buy an indie game understanding that there will be places where you can see the shortcuts born of necessity but that those very same constraints promote creativity.
If you can have dozens of artists, voice actors, animators, marketers and the like you are starting to leave the realm of small studio.
Something not being indie isn't a slur, most of the greatest games of all time came from large (for the time) teams. Games take work, go figure.
If we put hades 2 in indie it's just unfair and unrealistic to people that are 4 mates with day jobs.
Nah it bothers me too. I think a 7 person indie team is large.
Indie is supposed to mean 2.5 people (the .5 is the composer splitting their time) and, if you get big, a humorously lopsided credits when translation and console ports add another 50 people.
Honestly, I know it's technically accurate to call various games "indie games" but it feels viscerally wrong to describe highly successful and famous game as indies. I don't think you can convince me (on an emotional level) that the statement "Terraria is an indie game" is not in some way inaccurate, despite it being constantly said.
Like, if you want to make an argument where the only requirements for being an indie game is that you self-publish, you could make the argument that a huge chunk of video games are indies because they are made in house and published in house. But I don't think ANYONE will ever call GTA V an indie game simply because it was made by Rockstar and published by Rockstar.
I feel like for an indie to actually be an indie in the modern day and age, it actually has to be somewhat small, otherwise you're just a regular ass video game company. When you sell millions of copies, have dedicated PR managers, a lawyer or two on retainer, how can anyone argue that you are an indie studio?
I agree with some of this but Terraria is definitely an indie game. It's been around forever and was significantly smaller in scale when it released years and years ago.
Im sorry but I dont see how success doesnt mean a game isnt Indie. Like take Undertale. Wildly successful but an indie game. (Not trying to start anything) I just assume we see this quite different.