Earlier this month, our Editor-in-Chief Stacey Henley asked, &qu๊ot;What🅠 is going on with indies at The Game Awards?" It's a question that many are still asking and one that its creator, Geoff Keighley, doesn't have concrete answers for.
, published by billion-dollar corporation Nexon and self-described as 'not indie' by its own developer, has been nominated by the jury. Meanwhile, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Baldur's Gate 3 is technically indie but did not make the cut. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The definition has become murky, and amidst Keighley's latest comments, everyone's arguing over it... again.
For outstanding creative and technical achievement in a game made outꦉside the tr𒁏aditional publisher system - The Game Awards.
"Independent can mean different things to different people, and it's sort of a broad term," Keighley told . "You can argue, does independent mean the budget of the game, does independent mean where the source of financing was, does it mean the team size? Is it the kind of independent spirit of the game, meaning a smaller game that's sort of different? I think everyone has their own opinion about this, and we really defer to our jury of 120 global media outlets who vote on these awards to make that determination".
Many argue that indie simply means independent, disqualifying those under huge publishers like Nexon, Ubisoft, EA, and PlayStation. Often, with good reason. As indie game Nightmare Reaper put it, "Publicl🐽y traded billion-dollar corporations and self-financed one-man indie devs are literally competing against each other for the same slice of the market."
Digital Trends gaming section lead Giovanni Colantonio added, "This wouldn't really be much of a big deal if there was any hope for small games to get nominated in regular categories. It's just that the opportunities for recognition are so slim for indie games. You get your two categories and even then they aren't exclusively for you."
Others believe it marks a shift in the very foundation of 'indie'. While it should be a classification, many now see it as a genre. "This is the problem with treating indie as a genre," @Grayson_304 said. "Dave the Diver feels like an indie game, and something like Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't, but one of them objectively is an indie and one isn't."
A big part of this is the "spirit" Keighley mentioned - games with pixel graphics are often assumed to be indie regardless of the wider context. "All this does is reinforce the incorrect perception that 2D/pixel art games and indie games are 'lesser' than one of the 'real' games," @TAHK0 said.
Many commenters have put forward suggestions for a broad definition - simply being independent, the studio being self-funded, not having a publisher, and being developed by a smaller team. Of course, plenty of 'indie' games are published by the likes of Devolver or Team17, which is where things also get murky.
Regardless, the general sentiment from one look online is that many disagree with Keighley's response and are calling for stricter guidelines at The Game Awards to prevent big-budget companies from pushing out indie developers from a chance at their own category.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网: Game 🔯Budgets Should Always Be Publi🐲c
We now know how much The Last of Us Pa🐠rt 2 and Horizon Forbidden West cost, but ဣthat information shouldn't be secret anyway.
