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)
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.