The Game Award nominations are more proof we need to redefine ‘indie’

destructoid.com:

I’m not surprised that The Game Awards has put games like Dave the Diver and Dredge on their list of nominations for the “Best Independent Game” award, but I am very, very disappointed.

That’s not to say that Dave the Diver is a bad game undeserving of an award. It’s just not indie. Its developer and publisher, Mintrocket, is a direct subsidiary of Nexon. The South Korean game publisher has an annual revenue in the billions of dollars. That’s not indie.

Dredge has more claim to the category of indie. Its publisher, Team17, considers itself an “indie publisher,” a label not exclusive to them. However, Team17 is a publicly traded company that raked in over 137 million pounds in 2022. At what point is a publisher no longer considered an indie publisher? That’s hard to say.

As an award, “Best Independent Game” should be a place where smaller developers who finance their games without the financial backing of a major company can find some recognition. However, with Dave the Diver on the list of nominees, The Game Awards is signaling that any major corporation can produce a game with pixel art graphics to buy away that recognition.

Splashed right across The Game Awards’ nominees page for “Best Independent Game” is the definition, “For outstanding creative and technical achievement in a game made outside the traditional publisher system.” The “traditional publisher system” isn’t entirely defined, but if we go by the definition that most industries go by, it means works published without those outside agreements at all. From artist to market, essentially.

Four of the five games nominated involve a publisher. Only one of them does not, which is Sea of Stars. That sort of makes it sound like successful games without publishers