Barkley said:
DerpSandwich said:
It's a game that's developed and published by one studio without the aid of a larger publisher. This is the correct definition. It's literally what "independent" means. We only call smaller projects indie games because we don't have a good word for them.
Kind of like with indie music. It was music that was distributed without a major label, but we didn't have a word for the genre they were commonly doing, so we started associating the sound itself with "indie." I feel it's a bit different with games though because indie music had a particular style, whereas games labeled as indie are really just smaller than regular games, sometimes even made by huge publishing companies.
Most people here want to do the whole "it's different for each person" thing, and I'm normally up for that line of thinking, but in this case there really is a correct definition for the term, and we're just plain using it wrong a lot of the time. (I'll probably get a lot of crap for being so sure of myself, huh?) |
Well you're right in way but the definition should change, if it hasn't already. If a single person made a game over the course of two years and then sent it to a publisher, the publisher liked it and decided to release it with absolutely no changes to his product, does that mean a game made by one person isn't an indie game? By your definition yes, but I think most people would view it as an indie and I think it should be viewed as one.
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You're right, that would mean it wasn't an indie game. We've come to refer to the term incorrectly as a way to define smaller projects. It's one of those things were everyone's going to do what they're going to do and I'm not going to get on their case about it, though at the end of the day there really is a correct answer, technically.
Sometimes I'll just refer to smaller games as "download games." That's not always accurate either, as sometimes they get box releases, but I think it's closer to being an accurate way to categorize them.
