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?
They’re successful, therefore bad.
I’m not really questioning the morality here. I was asking more because I didn’t see what made it petty bourgeois instead of something else. I think I understand their point since the company’s owners all actually work there, but I don’t know all the details of their finances, and the detail of whether all the studio is owned by its founders/other devs, or by some investors, makes all the difference here. I don’t know anything about game dev finances so I can’t even really guess, maybe they just got started with some sort of grant or loan for all I know.
It was supposed to be a joke about how vulgar class analysis often boils down to “are they successful and making money or poor and struggling?” but it may not have come across that way and might be a bit hostile, but I wasn’t trying to target anyone in this thread with this.
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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
studioteam 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
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
studioteam 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.
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.
I’d say it’s indie… Plus their publisher is a co-op
their publisher is not a co-op, and first and foremost they have a publisher that gave them millions of dollars
There should be a new term for it.
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
When anyone describes a game to me as being a “roguelike” I immediately understand what the game is like less. I also constantly wonder if they mean “rogue-lite” since they sound 99% the same.
And this is after watching like 3 youtube videos on why the term exists; I really don’t know how that term caught-on like it did.
They really just mean entirely different things to different people. In fact, when you imply that “rogue-lite” would clarify things here, that confuses me, because “rogue-lite” also means different things to different people.
There’s the traditional roguelike purist view that goes something like this:
Roguelike: ASCII or tile based graphics. Turn based. Dungeon Crawler. Procedural generation. Permadeath.
Roguelite: Some of those qualities but not all, permadeath is mandatory.
That’s the version on wikipedia. Based on that dichotomy, roguelikes include Rogue, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, Cogmind. A game like Spelunky, FTL, or Hades is a Roguelite.
But then there’s a newer dichotomy that’s based on the way perma death works, so it’s a bit like:
Roguelike: Procedural generation. Dungeon Crawler. Permadeath with no meta-progression
Roguelite: Same but with meta progression
(there might be some disagreement on what constitutes meta-progression, I’ll just say it means progress between runs excluding unlocks, so upgrading your stats or adding more stuff to your run, but not unlocking new spells or heroes to do the runs with)
Based on that dichotomy, games like Enter the Gungeon, Spelunky, Noita, and even Slay the Spire (if you can consider it a procedurally generated dungeon crawler) enter the category of roguelike, while games like Hades or Rogue Legacy are roguelite. Games like Balatro, Vampire Survivors, or Monster Train (unless you consider a couple of random shops and an event between combats a procedural dungeon crawl) aren’t really either, unless you loosen it up to no longer require the dungeon crawler aspect. The reason I still included that one, though, is that the dungeon crawler aspect is what really distinguished roguelikes originally.
I think the most general sort of vibe of what a roguelike or roguelite is, is simply a game where you start and end a run within a play session, each run has significantly different stuff you find because there’s random terrain/enemy/loot/etc generation, and you generally aren’t expected to be able to beat the game on your first try (nor are you expected to stop after your first win)
vibe based classification
~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.
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.
I’m not calling them the development team, but it doesn’t change the fact that 133 people contributed to this pretty large game. They had the budget to hire all these people for translating, voice acting, marketing, legal, accounting etc
we talk about indie developers not indie localization and marketing
they could make the game only in english and take like 100 people off of those credits.even slay the spire was made by two guys, a contracted composer, a contracted 2d artist, QA’ed and playtested by a bunch of people, and localized by a bunch of people.
At this point “indie” music just means “the music that doesn’t get heavy rotation on the top 40 pop stations”
Or “alternative” music lol. Fortunately, I’m not elder Millennial/Gen X enough to care
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 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.
Kinda like the death of mid-budget cinema. Now everything is either a cheap passion project or a 300 million dollar extravaganza
Midway being AA is also funny because they were a Bally subsidiary that was publically traded and had like 600 employees. Same with Lucasarts.
Doublefine would be one that could take that moniker probably, since they mostly self fund and have a staff size small enough where most people probably still know each other (~100)
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.
I don’t think this is the right history of the term. Old roguelikes were games that were similar to Rogue: procedurally generated permadeath dungeon crawlers with little or no progression between runs that were as unforgiving as old editions of D&D. Then you had a bit more breadth to it with things like Dwarf Fortress falling under the label despite not being a D&Desque dungeon crawler at all. “Roguelites” then emerged as games trying to copy the procedurally generated permadeath dungeon crawler archetype but with some sort of meta progression to make the player stronger between runs, but the term merged back into “roguelike” for basically the reasons you gave.
Now it’s like a vague category of short procgen runs with no safety net (meaning you have to restart a run if you ever fail), usually with some kind of meta progression between runs, although what a “run” is in context can vary a lot between games.
Yeah, not sure where they got “low-graphic gameplay/storytelling focused RPGs” from. Absolutely nobody called Ultima a roguelike lmao
Roguelike was just another way of saying Rogue clone, so games like Nethack, ADOM, and so on. It’s like how FPS was originally just called “Doom clones.”
Well that all just sounds awful.
AAA
AA/A/B
Sound like Moody’s credit ratings
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.
