Sadly, people use indie to mean small, rather than it's actual meaning of "independent of a publisher", and it's one of those things that I've nearly given up on fighting.

It's even more sad because the only reason that change happened was big publishers wanting in on the success of indie games as a label and concept, but by definition being excluded, so they pushed their own definition, and people gobbled up their corporate cooption.

> Sadly, people use indie to mean small, rather than it's actual meaning of "independent of a publisher"

That is way too imprecise a description for it to possibly be considered correct.

Indie is about financial and creative independence aka the publisher does not drive the game.

Many indies still go through publishers because they don't have the means or knowledge to handle distribution. This was even more so back when you had to distribute via physical media, but they start looking for publishers once the game is done or in good shape.

For instance back when they built Bastion SuperGiant had just 7 people and it was entirely self-funded. But they went to WB for publishing, mainly to ensure getting it on XBLA would not be too much of a hassle.

>That is way too imprecise a description for it to possibly be considered correct.

It's the most objective definition. We can easily see if a game studio a) has their own publishing wing (people forget this when saying stuff like "Valve is an indie!"... It's few but they have published others' works since 2004) and b) the game has an external publisher.

But as the GP said, this definition (just like in music) was perverted over the years into CDXS2the modern, colloquial definition that you mention. Much less precise because we do not in fact know how much the publisher drives any given indie, a term locked under contracts and NDAs we'll never see. We simply need to trust a publisher's branding.

But no one is particularly interested in changing the current defintion. Publishers want to have that branding, indies want to have that branding, gamers seem to intuit what kinds of games and styles that "feel indie". So I guess it'll go by the way of the definition of "literally".

"Independent of a publisher" is less precise than, "independent ideas and creative freedom"?

Mine is literally a binary, factual assessment, that is easily verifiable: did they use a publisher?

Yours is a standard that the public has no way to verify, and is regularly is lied about by devs and publishers. Every publisher says they let their studios have full creative control. No one says, "yeah, we interfere in design decisions all the time".

> Many indies still go through publishers because they don't have the means or knowledge to handle distribution.

No, indies didn't go through publishers, small studios do.

What you are describing is just indie studios signing on with publishers, becoming dependent* on them for some aspect of distribution. Literally ditching their indie status.

Why do you think *any* size developer that uses a publisher does so? To gain the advantages of their greater resources.

As another commenter pointed out, this term doesn't originate in video games, it comes from musicians who do not sign on with a record label.

indie is literally a shortening of independent though, the term i believe originated from musicians who would release their music without a label to publish them

Isn’t AAA vs AA about the funding of the project, and AA vs indie is about the publisher?

I don’t care for scope as part of this because scope is so heavily influenced by the type of game. Eg Call of Duty is the poster child for AAA games and has a pretty unimpressive scope compared to virtually any RPG. Even indie RPGs tend to have a broader scope; CoD has basically nothing outside of combat mechanics.

Then there’s weird questions about what counts as scope too. Tabletop Simulator has a much broader scope than MTG Arena, but Arena is far closer to AAA or AA.

I specifically said scope of the "project" instead of the "game".

You're right that CoD is simple, but it's still a massive project where most areas (graphics, networking, game engine, etc.) are infinitely more developed than a game like Stardew Valley which is a much broader experience _as a player_.

Star Citizen must be AAAA then with all that feature creep!

Jokes aside, it still feels very subjective to me. Eg I wouldn’t point to CoD as a shining example for any of that. Their in-game launcher sucks, the voice chat is 2003 cell phone quality, the graphics are nice but not groundbreaking, and the stability of the game/servers is worse than most of the indie games I play even after installing mods.

CS:GO has better voice, better stability, and now you can shoot holes through the smoke from grenades. Servers are also 128Hz, where CoD just went from 20Hz to 60Hz (just in time to be out of date again).

COD is the poster child of scope creep to me. It has half-assed support for just about everything under the sun. I wouldn’t really call any part of it “developed”, though.