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.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Game developers and publishers alike don't agree on it, and other prominent people in the industry all seem to have different opinions on it now too.

You see it was developed by Mintrocket, a sub-brand of Nexon, who are a pretty big South Korean publisher that have billions in income.

Arguments on this have been ongoing since the nominees were announced a couple of weeks ago, and adding fuel to the fire now TGA's Geoff Keighley has given some thoughts on it during a recent Twitch (about 27:00) livestream and Keighley's response to a question on it was:

We really defer to our jury, 120 global media outlets that vote on these awards to kind of make that determination of is something independent or not.

It's a really complicated thing to figure out and come up with strict rules around it, so we kinda let people use their best judgement and you can agree or disagree with the choices, but the fact that Dave the Diver was on that list meant that out of all the independent games that the jury looked at or what they thought were independent games that was one of the top 5 that they looked at this year.

As otherwise, you likely would just get the huge publisher games filling up every year but the category itself is just not named particularly well it seems, or they need to actually properly settle on what indie actually is.

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Its like indie music versus indie rock.

Indie music has been around forever, with a wide range of artists from different styles contributing. It means being on an independent label and many artists of many different styles contribute to it.

Indie rock is a particular style that evolved out of the indie music scene. It has a particular sound and some consistent themes. It evolved out of but is not limited to the indie music scene.

There are sever non-"Indie music" bands that make "Indie rock".

Pixel graphics, avant-garde play styles, weird themes. These are hallmarks of the "indie style" of game development, and evolve from not necessarily having the resources of a large studio. But they themselves become the definitions of what it means to be "indie". Consider turntables and record scratches in hip hop. Consider 8 track recorders in techno, and 4 track recorders in garage music.

I think the quote from CB sums it up: "The work, which becomes a new genre itself, will be called... COWBOY BEBOP"