I'll go with the Supreme Court pornography definition. If it feels like an indie game that's good enough for me.

I don't care if it's 3 people who did the work in a public library because they didn't have the capacity to rent a workspace or 3 people 100 layers of corporate ownership underneath a mega-corp. Did the small team's vision get executed with the only constraints being budget and creativity, or did it get dictated by someone else to meet some corporate goals?

But I will say, specifically in terms of awards, that removing anything with big bucks behind it at the time of development (and arguably if there were serious publishing resources after the fact) has merit, because it's so easy for money to corrupt the results.