Alkibiádēs said:
Nuvendil said:
And? You asked for reasons, I gave them.
Showing one example that those reasons could be wrong in highly selective circumstances doesn't say much here. There's a select few indie devs that could make a select few IPs work. But the majority of IP hele by Nintendo? So few, so very few have the means to handle them. I mean, just look at your example: Sonic Mania is handled as a partnership with indies but Sonic 2017 is not.
Also, your definition of indie you put up is just plain false. Indie means independently developed out from under the auspices and restrictions of a traditional publisher relationship. You can have 5 developers like Shin'en, or a 100. You can have a budget of 25,000 like Freedom Planet or millions like Yooka-Laylee. You can self distribute or find physical distribution after the fact. This is video games, not books, the definition of indie is different because the relationships between the various sectors of the industry are different.
And Nintendo isn't classified as indie because Nintendo is not a developer, it is a publisher, hardware manufacturer, and parrent company. Nintendo EAD, Monolith Soft, Retro, these are the developers opperating under the umbrella of "Nintendo". It's no different at all than Bethesda Game Studios' relationship with Bethesda Softworks. It's not size, it's structure and whether or not the studios are opperating under the auspices and restrictions of a parrent company/publisher/etc.
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Absolutely nobody considers a studio that is 100+ men strong an indie developer.
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What people consider a thing is irrelevant, what a thing *is* does not change with the whims of people's arbitrary definitions. The point of indie as a concept is that one is independent: free of the restrictions imposed by working in the traditional publisher-developer relationship. Freedom, in other words. That can be a reality with 10, 20, 30, even a 1000 developers. The only limitation is how big a team you can assemble and how much in the way of funds you can raise. Relegating the "indie" concept to rag tag groups of 25 or less working on weird games or retro games is a silly and completely baseless restriction.
In short, "indie" is not and was never meant to be a "genre" of games.
