"Insomniac Games confirmed that there will be a download code for this game for all physical copies of Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus."

From Wipeoutpure HD wikipiedia page:

Retail 

• ^EU 16 October 2009

are DLCs indie?

A download code to get it for free with a future title that was released years later hardly means it wasn't a digital only title (though it did get a retail release in the EU)

Also Wiepout HD retail was EU only, and was over a year after it's initial release. If a title comes to retail later does that mean it was suddenly never an indie game by your defintion?

Infamous First Light would be another exception to your rule.

PieToast Pls......

P.S: Love the whole adventure time thing you have going on .

This, basically.

Indie games are games made and funded independently and usually starts without any publishers. Only after making the game or having made enough of the game to display and promote do indie developers go to certain interested parties to help publish their games, or sometimes publishers go to them if they attract enough attention.

OK after further research and I quote ( The urban dictionary ):

"Short for Independent Games. These are games partially or (mostly) fully developed by unofficial game developers."

We now need to further break this down:

An unofficial game developer is a group of people or one person who well frankly don't have a company and are developing a game or mod by themselves, with no funding.

Therefore Journey and the like do not form part of the indie spectrum, mods are practically the only games which form part of the indie spectrum.

That's the whole theory I can make up .

Independent video games (commonly referred to as indie games) are video games created by individuals or small teams. - Wikipedia

I'll just go with that.

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.