Geoff Keighley Has Everyone Arguing Over What Makes An Indie Game Indie

thegamer.com:

Earlier this month, our Editor-in-Chief Stacey Henley asked, "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.

Dave the Diver, published by billion-dollar corporation Nexon and self-described as 'not indie' by its own developer, has been nominated by the jury. Meanwhile, Baldur's Gate 3 is technically indie but did not make the cut. 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 outside the traditional publisher system - The Game Awards.

"Independent can mean different things to different people, and it's sort of a broad term," Keighley told VGC. "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, "Publicly 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