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this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2025
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I don't know if I agree. Size has some impact. Risking the livelihoods of you and your friends working for peanuts in your bedrooms is one thing, being at the helm of a billion dollar business is a bit of a different beast.
But yeah, it does matter whether you're public or private. A whole bunch of indie games are made by public companies, though. Definitely by corporate-owned companies and companies with big corporate investors.
By that bar a lot of the "indies" being touted here aren't really... that.
yeah the mudding of the term indie is also a problem. indie should be used for independent privately owned studios. the "indies" made by big public company's should be called something else. as all they are smaller games not independent games. like BG3 is a indie game but it's not a small game at all.
honestly think the term indie for smaller games was created by the big public company's as a way of keeping indies in their lane. they want them as the farm league feeding them ip and innovation. but not get too big to usurp them.
Nah, I don't think it's malicious.
The term has been muddled from the beginning. There wasn't a concept of "indies vs triple A" until Microsoft started offering digital-only games under servere restrictions for size and feature set. Because that made people assume that indie = small and because some design tropes became part of the common understanding of the term we ended up in a very weird middle ground.
Before that happened nobody really thought about indie vs triple A, it was mostly first party versus third party. Games were mostly gated by storage cost and performance rather than budget, so games from big studios and small studios mostly looked the same. You could definitely have used those terms in the PS1 era to compare massive stuff like Final Fantasy VII or Metal Gear to smaller shovelware, but back then that was just the difference between good games and bad games.