What Does it Mean to be Indie in 2025? | Design Club

[Music] Good time zone, internet. Hello and welcome to Design Club, the only game design show on the internet that realizes we should probably ask one additional question mere moments before we start. I am your humble host, Will, joined as always by my pal, Jeff. Say hi to the people, Jeff.
Hi to the people, Jeff. Hey, everybody. I am Jeffrey Zatkin, the studio director of Extra Credits and Extra History or just Extra Credit Studios and a longtime game designer and owner is the wrong word keeper of the Fluffy Cat Pival. Joined as always by my friend and voice of the people, Will. Hi everybody. I'm Will. I do all of our live stream production here. I also play a lot of video games and I have occasionally referred to myself as unabashed indie trash which is going to be incredibly relevant to the topic of our conversation.
Oh, it is so relevant to actually. Well, I love our different backgrounds for this.

Yeah,
because you are a game connoisseur. you are player of games,
you know, going through more games than almost anybody else I know
because that is part of your thing is looking at games where I come from a video game development background of making games but also from a video game market research background of later in my career going and helping analyze games and helping both dev studios and publishers figure out the kinds of games to make to like help keep their studios, you know, from going out of business, which is nice because we've seen a lot of people going out of business recently
and um I am because I'm no longer in that field. I think if I was still in that field there would be less
of it for sure.
All of that together is like I come from the video game let's go make game side of it and you come from the let's go play game side of it,
right? And let's go buy game side of it, right? One of the things we do here on Twitch, not infrequently, is we will

dive in and look at Steam listings for games. And I have
I have shopped through so many Steam sales, it has become boring and routine right now. I think that Steam sales have become boring and routine in general, but that's a topic for another day. But yeah, so um
can you make a sale exciting?
Yes, you absolutely can.
This feels like another design club topic.
Correct. We'll talk about it another time, but uh yes, Steam has significantly fallen off in that regard. Um
by the way,
oh very super daddyo. I like it. It's very good. Um
every Father's Day for the past couple years has been a different cup. This is one.
I like it. I like it. So, uh, relevant also to our discussion, we should probably, uh, put down if you if you if you're not looking below or you're not looking at when this is, we are streaming today on the 11th of September, 2025, which means it has been one week since Silk Song launched

and 24 years since Bad Events in New York.
Correct. Uh yeah,
not part of today's stream, but also
for everybody affected still, you know, take care of yourself and we're sorry.
Worth acknowledging. So yes,
um one of the questions that's come up is this sort of nebulous conversation that's floated around about what how do we classify, categorize, understand, do anything with Silk Song in terms of its size, right? Obviously, it is an action combat platformer Metroid Vania, right game, right? With a whole bunch of other elements from other genres mixed in there. But more on that when we get to our Silkong Postmortem, which will be after I 100% the game. So, it'll be a while. Um,
what? That's not a 5-hour game, Will.
Uh, no. No, it is not. It's even less of

a 5-hour game when I'm terrible at beating some fights. Uh, and that's a thing. So,
um, sympathy and understanding.
Yeah. Right. I spent two hours on the fight yesterday. It was great and I hated it. Um, does is that going to stop you from 100% of the game? No. No, it's not. So,
but what part of what's um Silkong coming out? Yeah. with Hollow Night being a thing is Hollow Night was unabashedly an indie game.
Yes,
100%. Like it along with Journey and a handful of others are kind of like poster childs for indie games that did really really well that batted far above their weight class.
Right. But part of them talking about it is they like say Team Cherry was Slay the Spire.
Mega Slay the Spire.
I mean not Team Cherry. Um Mega
Mega Crit with Slay the Spire.
Sorry. Team Cherry is another I've been

Yeah. Right. Yeah. Keep going.
With Slay the Spire. Like their first game did so well and their studio was so small that they equivalently made unlimited money for their studio. They're not billionaires. They're not hundred millionaires, but they got enough money off that game that for the, you know, two people at Mega Crit or the how many people on So, um,
that's a really great question. There Team Cherry is technically two people.
But it's actually more than that. So, we we'll get to that.
We'll get to that. But like they took seven years to make their game and they didn't have to make another game.
Correct. And so part of the question is are they still an indie group? Like indie has become over the years it had a cleaner thing when it started, but it's such a it could mean so many different things to so many different people at this point,
right?
And is it like if your studio had unlimited money and got seven years to make their game, are you still indie?

Because like there's some criteria would say no, some would say yes. Right. So, we wanted to talk about that because
Yeah.
It's weird.
Yeah. And and and we're I think we should start by acknowledging that lots of people are going to have lots of places that they start with this, right? Oh, yeah. I think most people would agree that the original Holiday is an indie game. I think the overwhelming majority of people would agree with that. And I also think the overwhelming majority of people would agree that Borderlands 4, which came out today, is not an indie game. So,
if we all agree on those things, the line and criteria is what's going to differ, right? I think we all agree that such a thing as an indie game exists.
Any of the Borderlands weren't indie.
Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Well,
Borderland Yeah. But
yeah,
Borderlands 4 just came out, but even Borderlands one when it came out.
Yeah.
Like that was not an indie game. That was a big studio game.
Yes. Correct. Um by design and uh it shows in every ounce of it. uh even if

they're having some Unreal Engine 5 optimization issues ripped to their reviews.
Correct. It did come out today.
Yeah, it's also there's a lot of games. It's like it is so easy to be like, "Wait, that came out?"
Yeah, absolutely. So,
let's start with
Let's start with the the most simple one, right? uh which which uh someone over in YouTube chat Johnny uh did did a really great job of bringing this up. Indie is independent from a publisher is that is one definition that we've sort of added about. Does it mean without a publisher?
And the answer is no. Yes. But like so I'm pretty sure that indie though I'm not positive.
Yeah. for games came actually from film indie movies. Yes. Like I'm pretty sure that's the delin or that if you traced back the usage of that and from a movie

perspective usually but not always an indie movie was a small scrappy movie with a low budget that was getting made without distribution yet. They didn't have a publisher or to basically take the movie and get it into thousand, you know, go market it and get it into thousands and thousands of theaters,
right?
So most indie films were shown at film festivals or things like it often with hopes of somebody big seeing it, picking it up, and then giving them the distribution. So, an indie film would have multiple releases like The Circuit where they'd go show it at all the festivals and then a theatrical release. And that's often why you'll hear the term theatrical release meaning this is when it actually had broad distribution and hit all of the theaters.
Yeah.
And
uh I I love I love this comment. According to Aiden, it can't be because

Deolver Digital is an indie publisher.
Publisher. Yep. And I think we would agree on that, right? Like Enter the Dungeon, a game published by Deolver, not I I don't think I would have a hard time convincing the overwhelming majority of you that
it is by most colloquial definitions and even some industry ones an indie title,
but it got published by Devolver.
Yeah.
Even most indie games that we know of
Yeah.
were published by publishers. And so Will and I actually spent a little time yesterday looking at a check or like trying to come up with things that could be qualifiers for Indian looking at them,
right?
But Indian independent I would actually say are different. I think indie is a classification a even if it's a loose one
of a type of game.
Yes. were independent most likely means you didn't have a

publisher,
correct? or like you know as a we are a standalone studio independent from you know being owned by a big publishing like any group that is owned by Sony is not an independent developer
right
they are development studio owned by a publisher that is one thing
right
and you know Microsoft owns a lot of studios PlayStation or Sony does Nintendo like there's a whole bunch of big groups big publishers EA you 2K, all of those that owns development studios. And then there's also studios that are independent of being owned. That doesn't mean they don't go seek out a publisher for funding or other things,
but they're still an independent developer as opposed to one that is basically has big daddy publisher that they can call on. And this is um that was I think that was that kind of came to a head last year actually during the game awards season when Dave the Diver got

nominated for best indie.
Mhm.
And a lot of people went Dave the Diver isn't an indie game and a lot of people went well Dave the Diver feels like an indie game
and it's self-published by uh Mint Rocket I believe is the name of that studio. Let me double check that. I have it in my notes before I get this wrong. Uh yes, but Mimrocket is also wholly owned by Nexon,
right? Which introduces another out outside stream of funding, right?
So, and just contacts and promotion and other things.
And you of course then get the kind of the opposite,
which is Boulders Gate 3 was self-published, but it's definitely not an indie game. Correct. It was an independently published game, but they were also Larry Studios having Divinity was big enough that they basically had the had the manpower to go act as their own publisher.
Yeah.

And that's where this gets really weird, which is why we wanted to dive into it.
Yeah. So, I I I think uh Braumaxer actually has a really great one here that I I just want to bring up because um developer led small or medium studio. Okay. We'll talk about what that means in a second, but I like this phrase, who operates independently of a publishers's authority.
That's kind of an interesting way to look at it, right? Because we've been talking a lot about the way the money flows and how that influences the game. But let we're going to hang on to that thought. We're going to come back to the idea
that was a that was almost as good a definition as I think I've ever heard.
Yeah. We're we're going to come back to the idea of outside a publishers's authority here in a little bit after we we check off some like um more colloquial like more colloquially obvious definitions. So, let's start with um so let's let's start with like
does being an indie game mean
right yeah
one lack of a publisher like
and um so we've already brought up what about indie publishers
right

but also what about games that released but then immediately got a publisher let's take Slay the Spire
y
slay the spire partnered with Humble to go make the uh iOS and um the iOS release and I think a couple of other
SK ported it.
Yeah. To port their game.
Yeah.
Because as a twoperson studio that was not their area of expertise,
right?
Or uh here's one. We can even go smaller. Bellatro.
Yeah. Battro is published by Playstack because Local Funk made a beautiful, wonderful, amazing game
and is not he by his own admission doesn't want to bother with the porting stuff.
Yep.
Right. And that and that's where that authority thing comes back. Right.
Right. So I don't think in any way for the way that people think about, hey, is this game indie or not? the having or not having a publisher itself is any

indication because Devolver puts out a ton of great indie games. They're an indie publisher.
Dave the Diver is arguably yes or no despite the fact that they're owned by Nexon.
Yeah, the um what was the other ones that I was thinking of? There are a bunch of really good indie publishers uh as well like Goblins, Humble,
I'm blanking and I'm so upset with myself. They're the group that published Tunic, Fini.
Fini has done some amazing art piece style games, right? Like um Chory, which is absolutely an independent title, but is published. Right.
Right. And in the same way, Boulders Gate 3, despite not having a publisher, isn't indie.
Right. It may be scrappy and batting well above its weight class for like double AAA S tier qualification which we can get to later but that doesn't make it indie.
Yes.
So okay actually speaking of budget budget bracket. So some people might

just say indie is a game with a budget below X
right pick a number. Pick a number. But that also doesn't necessarily qualify something because there are very specific categories of games. For example, budget titles, copy and resins, or even shovelware whose whole point is we didn't spend a lot of money on development. But they also don't I don't think anybody would argue that, you know, the 299 budget game in Walmart is an indie game. It's a shovelware game sitting in one of their bins.
Exactly. And uh this is sort of a broader problem with the industry in using these terms. Um also in recent history, we're talking a little bit about this as we were getting uh warmed up to to start the stream. Uh recently the co-founder of Devolver
called a game, doesn't matter which game they he uttered the words in an

interview, a quintuple a game.
That's four A's.
Five A's.
Wait, quintuple. skipped four A and went straight to 5 A. It went to 5 A's. Right.
That's usually called S tier.
Correct. There. But while these these AAA used to have more well understood budgetary brackets to put games in and your understanding of the what could be expected from that game in a category that's come to mean less and less and less as some groups, Rockstar for instance with GTA X are spending more and more and more and more, right? while the floor
I'm pretty sure Rockstar or the next Grand Theft Auto between marketing and development will exceed a billion dollars.
Absolutely 100%. And we've talked
that's that's not a 1 billion pulled out of thin air like I added up rough cost of manpower by or their thousand plus employees and number of years they've been working on it and typical amount

you spend on marketing based on that number it is going to most likely go over a billion dollars. Right. And at the same time, the low end, right? We've talked about this before. It is getting cheaper and more accessible to enter on the um to to the solo dev end, right? what we would probably normally
between Unity and many other good tools like and just the basic capabilities that you can go buy, you know, Playmaker or you can go buy, you know, some of the other plugins for Unity like you can go buy a visual novel package will for 120 bucks and get Unity and have the entire framework to make a game being a writer and an artist.
Yes. And so those things being true, it becomes harder and harder to classify games coherently on the basis solely of their budget, right?
But just so people know from an educational standpoint, yeah,

the terms AA, AAA, etc. initially came referring to budget within the game and they've come to mean other things but it was letting groups know hey this is the you know this game was a AAA budget and therefore you know as we're hiring and making the game you know we will need if we're delivering a AAA experience we're going to need this many artists this many engineers this many so and so to deliver on the polish level expected from that and it kept publishers and other groups from unfairly comparing say the aesthetic and feel of a a budget game versus a triple a budget game when one of them had 50 times more artists y
than the other
because those were just things and S tier as well.
Like
for S tier for a while had meant over hund00 million in development. Now it means even more
like that's probably just AAA now is around like
it because people cost money and games take time to build. But they've also come to for a lot of consumers, you

know, they're used to most console games being AAA games on kind of delivery and polish and experience. And I think for most consumers perspective perspective, AAA often just refers to a number of features and b art. Like I almost never hear somebody say, "Wow, that was AAA gameplay." But I absolutely hear them say, you know, oh, this had, you know, AAA looking art versus, you know, this game which had a more indie aesthetic,
right? So, um, I I like this this thought from Genius. Uh, real quick before we move on to our next category, one of the things that used to be the case but isn't anymore is India is a direct antonym to AAA and I think that that I absolutely agree with that.
Um, and now that might be kind of true, but I don't think is strictly true.
Um,
yeah. So the the other one uh oh that's a great question man chat you all are just coming up with some great comments and questions is on fire today.
Yeah. Um, if a game starts as an indie

game, finds success, and then gets bought up, is it still an indie game? Like Minecraft, because m Minecraft defies so many rules. Like most of the things we're talking about have a little hidden asterisk like up here above my head in the corner. And and that asterisk is except for Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Undertale, right? A lot of the
except for a handful of titles.
Yes.
X,
right? Because as you've heard if you listen to Will and I, there's always exceptions.
Yes. So Minecraft is probably one of the biggest weird exceptions, especially because a reminder that Minecraft is a pay once owned forever game that has been getting games as a service style free updates yearly since it launched.
Yeah. Actually, Will, for those who don't know, do you think you could give a 30 secondond history of early to mid Minecraft?
Yeah, sure. So Minecraft was a project started by like one guy named Notch. Uh and he developed the project and it kind

of took off and the company that um sprung up around it. Mojang got bigger and bigger until eventually Notch left the project over for a whole bunch of reasons, none of which we really need to get into and it got bought by Microsoft at which point the it got folded into the Microsoft ecosystem and is now one of their poster child games mostly because Minecraft has sold 330 million copies and has been one of the number one uh has been the number one game on most mobile platforms until it was dethroned by Batro. I think that's probably it. It was the number one mobile game on every platform I'm aware of until Bolatro came out, which is one of the points where we knew that Bellatro was serious business.
Yeah.
Right. Um, so, so I think it's a great question. Um,
okay.
Hey, Will, what is that in from YouTube chat? I am not used to that message type.
Oh, that's uh that's a super chat on YouTube. It's like bits here on Twitch.

Uh oh, awesome. Uh but yeah uh says speaking from experience making games solo is easier than it ever has been. Yep.
Purely because of the uh logistics developing solo is even easier than working with a small team. Yeah. Because
at some point will I want to do a check-in on the game I'm slowly building solo specifically to support that what you just said or they just
Jeff is currently in the in his I don't know how many of you are familiar with this concept. It's I'm I'm gonna I'm I'm going to try and pronounce this correctly. spare time. I'm not familiar with it. Maybe you're not familiar with it. Jeff apparently has some of it and he's decided to spend it building a game. Um and so uh uh we'll we'll check in on that at some point. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Spare time. Exactly. Namek's totally got it. Um
it's it's okay. So lack of a publisher,
right? Lack of a budget bracket budget
and budget actually gets to team size.
Yeah. Um because one of the things a lot of people classify as an indie is a game

with a hundred people developing it is probably not an indie game.
Yes.
But a game with two people probably an indie game and
but
or but yeah
right. How do you define who worked on a game?
Mhm. Because so this is one of the big this has been one of the big I'm not gonna say it it's it's like a discourse right but one of the big questions that people have had is
team cherry two people three people arguably with the composer um and that most people are willing to grant that he's a part of team cherry for the purposes of this
but in the credits it's like 97 90 people 100 people professionally credited or it's it's 90 people professionally credited with uh another seven thanks I think on silk song I actually have them up
you could bring that up because like one of the things or you know slay the spire

two people but you know those might be the devs but you know what about the composer what about the testers what about the contractors you know what about the marketing or PR people like there's a lot of people that touch a game besides just the dev team that are accounted for some things and not others but even on dev There's often a lot of people who've contributed
y
in so like it's a hard thing to tell but indie often means they they contribute in their spare time or on a contract basis
versus if you're on say Grand Theft Auto where you're just into the Rockstar fold
right so here right
okay
if we look we have up here you can see uh this is uh on Moby games uh that's where I found the written credits for this and for Silkong
okay
or for Silkong and for Hollite. Um, so it's 97 people, 90 of which are professional,
but Team Cherry,
seven thank yous.
Seven thank yous. Um, Ari Gibson and William Pellen are listed as team Cherry
and there's a technical director, Jack

Vine, but it doesn't take us very long to see people who like even if and we should be counting people who work on marketing and public relations as working on a game because that's a really important part of making the game a success. But even if we don't, it doesn't take us very long to get to someone who definitely worked on the game. Qui, right, who worked on additional programming or
Jack Vance, the technical director,
right? Or or or or right. So of these of these people, a great many people did character voices and orchestration and um uh localization and unity technical support, right? Unity technical support. That's a huge deal, right? How do we debug this thing that we've created in a game about bugs? Um, and so all of this uh to say that there are right even in a game that has two people working on it, there's a lot of people working on it, right?
Or there's pe there's a lot of people who touched in like in different ways and nobody's going to argue that Ari and

William didn't do most likely the lion share of everything.
Correct. But it's also that they couldn't have released this
without some of these other people.
Right.
Right. So, uh when we talk about it, right,
uh when we talk about team size, right? If we're saying studio staff, that's different than number of people who touched the game, which is also different. And I cannot stress this enough because this is a good reminder. That is also a different group of people than the people who end up in the credits because for depending on the game, lots of people may be uncredited for the work that they did because the video game industry doesn't have um as strong uh conventions regarding credits as like the film industry does.
Right.
So those are like three different metrics that we could use. And we talk about this how many people made the game.

Yeah. And it's an interesting thing too, but typically in the grand scheme of things, larger teams aren't indie. Smaller teams most likely are or lean more towards it. But also then you get this weird thing of like what about teams that have unlimited money but choose to remain small. Like most indies when you think of it are small because they don't have the budget to go get more people.
Yes. Like every game I've ever worked on, literally, and I've worked on a lot of games, would not have been a myth to like, oh, we've got extra money. Man, I'd love an extra programmer, engineer, tester, you know, any number of things that would make everybody's life a little easier if there was just one or two more people to do a thing. Like, you never have well, excuse me, very rarely have everything you ever want. And there's things that get left out of your game because when you look at the priority list of how much time do we have and how many people do we have and that combination is what you can get into the game almost never no team ever

got everything they wanted
even the really really really big teams and so there is also a choice on some of this where you're like screw it I want to like the game I'm idally working or slowly taking time to work on is going to maybe I'll find another person or two to help at some point like significantly really help. But I am choosing to remain small. I have made big games. The game I want to make isn't a game I want to bring lots of people on. Right.
And we can come back to part of why I think I might qualify as indie on that one but haven't on others.
Right.
Actually, here's a good example, Will.
Yeah. The last game I commercially released before then like within a year coming on to run become studio director over here was um Settlers of Katon in the VR ecosystem.
Right.
So we got we had the official Katon license just like for the game before we had the official D&D license. I got to work with Klaus Tuber's sons. Klaus

Tuber is the guy who wrote Katon or made Katon. His sons Benny and Gido. like we got to confer with them when working on this,
right?
We were, you know, in the Oculus at the time before it came meta ecosystem. We were their premier game getting shown at GDC, I think 2018, like the very center of their booth. We were the bestselling game on it, but our team size was under 20,
right?
Like we were equivalently in a premier spot
with a branded game.
Yep. and a studio that had intentionally kept itself small because for our first couple games every single person there actually the minimum person had 10 years experience. So it was all industry vets basically saying we think with a small team we can do these quickly because VR is growing like that was our whole studio strategy. Were we indie? We were small. We had a low budget,
right?
And we were scrappy, but we were also working, you know, on
one of the most beloved licenses in the board game area,

right? And
with all veterans,
right? And had uh partnered closely with the platform on which those games were going to be released, right? You were getting premium treatment.
They didn't give us any money, but we partnered like they weren't funding us. That would have been nice.
It would have been great. No, but the the visibility, right, of that is is also a thing, right? Um, and that didn't even make our list of things, right? But visibility, right, if it's on the front page of Steam, is it indie? Do you have to go digging through menus and like find it in the drags in the back with like four user reviews? Is that
like Silk Scrone was Silkong was on the launch screen for Steam? Still is. If you I believe it's the first thing you see
Silkong might turn Steam on.
Yeah. Like it's an interesting thing. So part of it, not just team size, but maybe I'll even add team a let's see team access.
Yeah.
Like when we were putting it on the PlayStation, we had a Sony rep.
Yeah.

You know, when we were putting on Oculus, we had an Oculus rep, right?
You know, we released it on I think eight different SKs
or pieces of hardware,
right?
Like that's But we were still a small team,
right?
It's a weird thing. But I don't think we would have called ourselves indie,
right? Okay. So, these next two
are are a little less I'm going to say that these deal heavily in like my neck of the woods, right? A lot of these have been like very like defined areas with with the things that Jeff is talking about. These actually are like a little more in my neck of the woods and deal with like the reasons that people call a game indie just by looking at it. Right. Okay. Which is what we got. One of them is the art style or the aesthetic. Right?
If you look at a game and it has a certain aesthetic, and when I say look at an indie game and it has a certain aesthetic, you've probably now thought of a game.
Mhm.
It might be a game like Lethal Company.

I would say that certainly has an indie aesthetic, right? Or a pixel art or very um or the the RPG maker aesthetic, right? or a Vienn aesthetic. Right. Those
or even one you can tell has a moderate like Bellatro.
Yes. Fez. That's another really good one. Right. It It looks Yes. Exactly. I like uh Miss Inkwitch's idea. Indie core. Exactly.
Right. That that it is an aesthetic and a genre appeal of a certain thing that has encompassed indie. Right. And I'm not saying vibes for this one. I'm saying just by looking at it, right? Um, lots of great examples here. Uh, Tunic, Dave the Diver. Yeah, Dave the Diver looks indie. Fez, all of these others have a very specific art style that's not um, God of War, the the newer ones, right? It's not the incredible,
even the older ones for the time.
Sure. Right. But it's not that

incredibly photorealistic. You know, the axe has more polygons in it than all of Fez, right? Like just Kratos's axe has more polygons in it than some entire indie titles, right? That's clearly not an indie aesthetic. But there is something on the other end that I think a lot of people intuitively would say is an indie aesthetic choice. But and Will and I were talking about this and part of what I shot back is
games with a limited budget. Yeah.
Are forced to make choices.
Like if you're making Grand Theft Auto 6,
I guarantee you there are at least 500 artists involved with that. Probably significantly more.
Yes.
All of which are top tier styles of artist. you know, whether it's concept art, doing the modeling, the rigging, the animation, the VFX, the texturing, the environments, the environmental VFX,

the lighting. Um, I mean, just I could go on and on. All of these different specialties that come together with a, you know, artistic director to produce what you see on screen.
Mhm.
A game that has access to one or two artists doesn't have that. like they don't have the ability to go spend three months modeling each figure that you're going to see on there,
right?
And etc. Like they just they don't have the manpower to do that. And so they are forced to make choices. And then what they what the smart ones do is they say based on the choices we make and the way that we appreciate look, what is the aesthetic of this game? and they find a way to basically make something that they enjoy and will look good but that they can do with a small team.
And so this is why you don't see photorealistic indie games is it takes too many people to do that. But it also doesn't mean that a you know low poly game

can't be made by a a big team.
Correct.
Or a stylized World of Warcraft for example. Blizzard is famous for stylized characters
that some people might consider a more indie aesthetic. Yeah.
Because th those are easier to make and produce.
Correct. Uh Grass has another really good one. Uh Team Fortress 2 as opposed to the games which came immediately before it, right? Cuz all the other Source Engine games are like
Garry's Mod or HalfLife or Portal, right? Even though Portal has kind of like a generally goofy aesthetic as uh regards the portal gun and the the bots, right, Shell still has a human like an obviously photorealistic human model compared to TF2, which
realistic, not photorealistic.
Yeah.
But actually, Portal's a great example. Portal was made by a small team.
Yeah.
Portal, looking at their stuff, did one character model.
Yes.
Total for their whole game.
Yes. They did good environments, but the environments were all repeating areas

where you and they set with their setting. Like here's indie choices. Let me tell you, looking at Portal, one character, a lot of story conveyed through voice where they could get a good VO actor and the story was actually added near the end of the game. Um, an environment that by its setting you expect to see a lot of repeated asset use and repeated areas. Yes. because you are moving through the testing grounds that GLaDOS is putting you through in it like you're not expecting it to go from different thing to different thing. You are in this area. This is what like they made a lot of choices that by the way they put it together. They could do minimal art assets
and still have it be super interesting.
And that that's those are that's what good indies do is they say based on what we want to do, how can we limit our art? so that it still looks amazing. And it might be a stylistic choice. It might be, you know, going 2D instead of 3D or 2 and a halfD. There's a lot of ways you

can do it, but um it is often working around a constraint as opposed to them saying, "Man, we're just going to make it look like this,
right?" And and and then we get into the inevitable question, which Zip uh just correctly brought up. Is Portal One indie?
Oh, yeah. And that's like kind of the Dave the Diver thing,
right? They're backed they were backed by here you have access to all of the source stuff and you get to make this cool tech demo which we're going to release. I I would argue that if it's indie it it is indie on the back of Valve thinking it was just a cute little tech demo and not a real thing,
right? And like that puts it in a weird place. It arguably belongs it arguably belongs in the exceptions category because it's so weird, right?
Oh, 100%. Yeah. But again, like and these are the things that make indie hard to define, but just kind of talking about the art and the aesthetic.
Yeah.
Like for most indies, it is getting

getting creative with the resources they have. And that to me actually might help define even more of the indie experience, which is you know that you are a small team.
Yes. Like I I think we can say indie is pretty much always a small team. You know, you're all small team. You don't have access to all of these things. How can you get creative with what you've got to put out a really cool experience?
Right. Yeah. Which sort of leads to the least helpful and most frequently cited definition of indie.
It's just the vibes, man. I just get like indie vibes from like the way that character jumps. I don't know, man. It's just like the vibes, right? And I think that is a ubiquitous definition of indie. I will fully admit that I occasionally you that that I that I use that definition, right? Like it is just a feeling, right? It's a and I think that that goes back to a word that Jeff's used a couple of

times quite intentionally and that word is scrappy,
right? that the idea that the team is doing as much as they can with the little amount that they have conveys in a lot of interesting ways. Um also, uh things like taking on bigger corporations tend to get something uh perceived as indie, right? So something like KMA putting out um tempm in the face of Pokemon, right? I don't know how many of you remember that, but like that was a big deal in the day, right? And like Kremo was not a massive team. Krema was like 20 people in a dog. I think um the dog was credited on their website. That's why it's important. Okay, just so we're all on the same page. Um but like people are immediately like, "Oh, they're an indie team. They're taking on the Pokemon Company and Nintendo, right? So it tends to be by comparison, right? That vibe thing can also be by comparison to other titles in the same genre of game that they're making,
right? Yeah. And feel I think it's the

problem with feel is feel is hard to quantify like
Yes. Absolutely.
It's Yeah.
And it it kind of it's indie as pornography. You know, I don't know what it is, but I know it when I see it,
which is a paraphrasing a quote from I think justice.
Yeah.
Like
which was kind of fun. And one I threw in that um just for completeness sake, indie also often, you know, if we had a checklist of things that help make a game indie or not, um market spend.
Yes.
And this also goes to access a little bit. like almost every indie game doesn't have the money or the market spend to go do traditional advertising and so also has to be scrappy with how they promote their game
which leads to some interesting things that often stick out as being quite

memorable. Um, for instance, Binding of Isaac, uh, and, um, Binding of Isaac did a couple of its releases as ARGs, very interesting ARGs with like fake websites and stuff that like one game master could put together and then uh, you know, put out as a as a way to drive viral interest in the game versus something like a bunch of billboards, a giant mural. on the side of a skyscraper.
And actually market spend. Yes, we do mean pre-release almost entirely for this because successful indie game that comes out might then have money to go do more marketing, right?
But at that point it is successful indie game as opposed to indie like. So yeah, this is kind of talking about the up and I mean and why indie games try and get streamers to engage with them more often or seek out, you know, try and get a journalistic article written in, you

know, Kotaku or IGN or, you know, something. They are looking for ways that don't involve, you know, here group here's, you know, $500,000 or $50 million to go get commercials and ads and buy influencers and all of these other things for promotion, right? So
yeah,
anyway, just for completeness. So
yeah, which leads us to one of the most fascinating odd questions that I think we need to answer for completeness sake, but I don't know that there's a great answer,
which is we've been talking about indie games and the teams that make them and the studios that make them.
Mhm.
Which means that we kind of have to disentangle this ever so briefly. Are all games made uh are sorry, is every indie game made by an indie studio?
And if that is the case,
conversely, does every game an indo

indie studio put out count as an indie game? And that gets to that to the Hollow Knight of it all, right? Because Team Cherry put out a game
when they kickstarted and ran out of money for Hollow Night, right? Like I don't think no the original Hollow Knight's indiness is not a question here. I think it's pretty unarguably indie, right? But that makes them an indie studio. So are they still an indie studio when they make Silk Song because of size?
Maybe. But they've got functionally unlimited budget, right? We've done the rough back of the
huge resource connection,
right? We we've done the back of the napkin math on how much money they made off of Hollow Night. It's north of $75 million. And that is an incredibly I want to be very clear that is an incredibly back of the napkin conservative estimate for the amount of money team Cherry made off that game. Right. Okay. Cool. Great. Awesome. So, um
probably more in
it's probably significantly more, but let's just say it's that for a team that size, even with hiring out contractors,

that's functionally unlimited money for seven years, right?
Are they still an indie studio? If they are, if if we say that they're still an indie studio, is Silkong an indie game for that reason?
Or are they now no longer an indie studio because they have all these things but still working to make an indie game,
right? And that's interesting. Yeah. Right. Because you I've also seen by the way indie studios get hired because indie studios often need money to go make a non-indie game which funds the studio to then go make the indie game that they actually want to do.
Correct.
In some cases they're working on both at the same time.
They basically have the indie game they're slowly making while taking contracts to go make other games to support them to support the studio to go make the indie game.
Right. And and I think uh uh Zip's got a really interesting one, right? Valve as a game developer has fits a weird number

of the criteria that we've theoretically listed for being an indie, right? But Valve surely isn't because they own Steam and Valve has Steam money, meaning they get to do and I'm checking my notes here. Yeah. Whatever they want for as long as they want.
Steam makes millions of dollars a day. They can do anything they want, right? in a very not indie sort of way,
right? And so the
and they also have a promotional platform that they own. So not just do they have unlimited money, any game they make, they can be like, "Here, everybody that logs into Steam, let's show you this on our front page because you may want to buy it." Like that is something no indie has access to,
right? And I think uh Bromaxer's got a really great point here that these do not need to both be true, right? Not every game made by an indie studio ends up as an indie game, especially considering commissioned work, but every indie game has to be made by an indie studio. And I

feel like that might be getting closer to where I land on this issue. I have room to be convinced on this, right? But uh it is very good to point out that both of those questions don't have to be yes or no,
right?
And that there also might be exceptions. We might say generally we think that 98% of indie games are made by indie studios but reserve the right to say you know there are occasional exceptions.
Right. Exactly.
Because I don't think if we're being if we want to be if we want to be true as opposed to accurate.
Correct. I think we have to say that there are always going to be exceptions to the rules to make this a useful def a useful working conversation.
Correct. Right. And and I think a lot of people are wondering why we bother getting into the semantics of this. I think it's because often and I just want to like as as we as we approach this point in the conversation, I just want to focus in real quick on

one of the things that happens in game journalism a lot and this is it is very true in game journalism. It's very true in the gaming industry in general is that people start slinging jargon like it's going out of style particularly in headlines. And very rarely do we stop or slow down and consider and pick apart that jargon so we can gain useful meaning and have a good conversation about those topics. Right? That is one of the reasons I think this is really important. Right? We might not reach a we're not going to reach spoilers if you've been watching this for 45 minutes and you're curious. We're not going to reach like an exact word definition of indie. Right? Indie is fundamentally a feeling in our hearts man. But like the the concept and picking it apart and examining what we believe and mean by indie is important when we talk about the industry as a whole and I just want to make sure that we're all on the same page there for that.
Actually, speaking of that, Will, yeah,
I'm going to do an endorsement that has

nothing to do with us because I just looking
at the last packs.
I actually picked up this shirt
uh
from a publishing group from a streetear company called Cantric.
Yeah. Yeah.
And they basically make urban street wear that's like RPG inspired.
They have a whole line of like wisdom, charisma, like other
things that if you look at you're like, "Oh, as a gamer, I recognize that." But if you're not a gamer, you're just like, "Oh, that's
looks like fun thing." But they're right at the booth next to Jasmine's booth, Bronze Girl, um, and a couple of other people. And I was like hanging out there. I'm like, "That's a good looking shirt." So shout out for no particular reason, but if you Google cantrip sweet street wear,
you'll find
Yeah. By the way,
cool shorts and hoodies.
This, if anyone's wondering why we don't sometimes ignore questions in chat, that's why. It's cuz once one of us hits a penny on the track, we go in like a completely random direction. That's why.

Um, it's a good shout out. There's no question. It's a good shout out, but we will get distracted. So
Oh, yeah. 100%. just like that for some reason like oh I'm wearing a shirt by an Indie street publisher vendor who actually goes to packs to you know pedal their wares to you know
right yeah to do the thing um and and yes I completely agree by the way with Sean's thought news will say new indie deck building rogike and its Pokemon yeah that's happened a few times right especially with um we were talking a lot about Valve Steam I don't know how many
Steam tags are the worst for
Steam tags are atrocious they're like yeah so Metroid Vania is a rogike is a Soulslike game. Those are all the same thing, right?
Well, if one person tags it, it must be true, Will.
No, no, those are not. No, they're not. Those are not the same thing. Those are like very different distinct things. They can have overlapping elements,
right? Thanks very much, Dead Cells. But like,

no. Right. And in the sim in a similar way, I imagine if we were to go looking for indie games on Steam, we would find some games that are like millions of dollars deep in a you know international marketing spend campaign that it's probably like the finals that's an indie game. It's not right. So that that's one of the reasons. Um
yeah, but like it also shows you will that indie is considered in some ways a genre or an aesthetic.
Yes.
Because it is a taggable thing. Yes. Right. Absolutely. Absolutely.
So,
and that actually brings me to a point that I think after having some discussions with Will, I'm pretty comfortable saying is,
yeah,
I think that there's actually an artistic sensibility that makes a game indie, which is different from other games that are not indie. And because if we're saying

it's just money, then you get shovelware and you know all these other things that would just be indie. So it's not the money that makes the indie. I think part of it is the team size, but that can vary. Like there's a whole bunch of stuff that varies. But I think for me and where we really look at AAA to differentiate it and by AAA I mean large spend game with you know 500 to a,000 people which is what AAA games have any AAA game you're playing has that nowadays is the tight artistic voice and creative direction and that requires a small team and that I think is part of what makes the indie sensibility and the indie vibe that you get that if you have 500 or a thousand people working on a game, by definition, you're going to get a a gestalt, even with strong artistic and design and other leadership, the amount

of people you have working on it means that your vision is going to be kind of this even with good direction, shared vision that all of these different people are poking and putting and kind of assembling together that no creative director, and I'll I'll throw an exception in a minute. No creative director can oversee all of that and therefore it is this collective creation where a small team with a strong vision going in.
Somebody who can say this is the artistic feel of it and I can enforce that because there are only two artists or one artist or three artists and I can look at everything and be like no that is not how this works. are the same with design and the engineering and the systems. The basically the artistic vision comes through differently with a good execution on a small team than it ever can with a large team,
right?
And that's why when you get a super director like what's oh what's the guy's name from Death Standing?
Kajjima Kajjima.

Kajjima. Like Kajjima can make a large team almost feel like an indie game with his hands on every single piece. But again, that's the exception to it. And that doesn't mean that big creative directors aren't great. They are. They're the ones who deliver us the Grand Theft Autos and the Borderlands and the Balders's Gates and all of these other things. But I think it that's part of for me the real thing is the feel of a small team with strong direction executes a thing differently than the feel of a large team even with artistic direction. Strong artistic direction.
Yeah, Sam Sam Lake is another really good one. That's a that's a very good point, Dark Wolf. Right. But like when we start when we start talking about solo creators, right, we go like Sam Lake, Cojima, Concerned Ape
from Stardew, Local Funk from Bellatro, right? Like when we start talking about like um you know, incred uh Toby Fox from um

Why does my brain blank on proper nouns that are right in front of my face? Undertale. Sorry. Um right we start in if we talk about like singular creators who have made their voice come through clearly in the work
we slowly trend towards talking about smaller projects I think
smaller projects smaller teams and like and that's even from like a consumerf facing side yeah and aure right um
right instead of looking
we're heading back to film which is where we started
yeah yeah to an extent yep Yeah, but again I think the fact like there are definitely people we are named actually even will write for a couple of things.
Um or but these are the exceptions.
Yes.
And they're almost always games with a very tight focus on a very specific part of it.
And I think that that's what I really mean when I say I'm indie trash. Some of my favorite games are hyperfocused.

They are exactly themselves and nothing extra. There is an economy that is present in this kind of game because there isn't any extra money to put anything in or there isn't any extra expertise to put anything else in and there is a focus, right? I love Slay the Spire because it is exactly it,
right? There isn't like a oh by the way you can draw your own cards thing, right? And there isn't there there isn't uh any additional unnecessary stuff. I love I love the heck out of Batro even though I don't play it because it fits on like could it legally be called a computer? Great. It runs Batro, right? And that's part of its charm for me because it doesn't have anything it doesn't need, right? It's it's very that that focus
becomes an element of the indiness of a game for me. And one of the things that I really enjoy about the indie games is

that tight tight focus.
And I think part of being a successful indie is embracing the constraints and really getting bringing through that artistic or aura vision to only hit the part, you know, to double down on the parts you need knowing you can't get everything else.
Yeah. Yeah.
Are you laughing at the Stardew Valley comment?
I was No, I was laughing at uh let's see, where is it? Got Bilatro on the toaster and Skyrim in the fridge and I forgot what I was making for dinner. Yes, correct. Chad is with it today 100%. Right. Like Yeah. And and and there's a really great question in in YouTube chat um which we'll get to in a second by the way on uh on
Yeah. If I had to define an indie game, it would be publisher. Like I don't care about the publisher and I probably don't even care about the budget as much, but

it would be actual team size and artist basically aour direction to focus in on the key parts. Yeah.
And again, like this is even making me think about, you know, I said the game I'm kind of idly building. Like I think one of the reasons even if they had the budget, most indie games don't go get hyperrealistic graphics is I think that takes away from like the focus of what they're doing. If you look too good, people might basically lose some of the purity of focus on the other things,
right? you you lose the charm, right, of what makes it special. Like there are there is an argument to be made that Vampire Survivors is in part so successful because it looks like crap.
Yeah.
Genuine, right? Crap, by the way. Affectionate. Um uh right. That incredibly low.
What's the time loop game where you keep going around that track? Um

oh uh uh I want to say death loop. No,
it's Hold on. Come here, Steam.
Loop Hero. Thank you, Chat. Yeah, Loop Hero. Chat's got it faster than we can get it. Um, yeah, right. Something like that is
if Loop Hero had looked like Diablo 4, I don't think it would have done as well,
right?
Just 100%.
I agree with that. Absolutely. Right. There is um
and I think maybe that it's that the aesthetic is a sort of uh flagging, right? um a way that you can uh quickly spot an indie game at a glance, right? Not just because it is a thing that is often true due to the limitations of a small team and a small budget, but because even when they have a choice to do otherwise, they choose that to maintain that not street cred, but like that way to get free marketing, right? Oh, this looks like indie trash. I'm in. Right. I I am an indie raccoon. Okay. If

you show me a can full of indie trash, I'm going to dive in and start eating something I shouldn't. Okay. And that's fine. I've accepted this. All right. But yeah, um uh
affectionately a trash panda.
Affectionately a trash panda. Yeah. Uh and I think and to this point, right, aa studio could make a game that has indie aesthetic. Absolutely. But it would fail to grasp the the aur uh nature. It would fail to grasp the limited scope, right?
Or would most likely fail to like again
assume everything has the caveat that sure it could be done,
but also here's the other thing.
I Okay, well, I'm going to throw this out there. Even wildly successful indie games
don't make money compared to medium successful AAA games.
Sure.
With some very rare exceptions. like a decently good AAA game. The sales of it

even like Hey, how many people how many people went and bought Shovel Knight in the past couple months?
Me.
Actually, not Shovel Knight, Hollow Night. Um
Oh, do you mean the original or the Silk Song?
The original.
Oh, a few. I I would bet that their past couple months sales have been pretty astounding. I think that there were even something as wildly successful as Shovel Knight,
Hollow Night,
compared to sales of say The Last FIFA or The Last Madden or Balders's Gate or Cyberpunk or, you know, any of those other games. Um, the sales are pretty minuscule and that's calling out a best-in-class. So I think part of it too kind of around that is you a a big AAA studio would never want to

make itself look like an indie game because as well as indie games sell they are not the mass market ubiquitous video game which you need if you have a budget to support all of those people.
Yes. Uh yes and and Mystic is correct. Uh it was uh Shovel Knight was wildly successful and that is one of the reasons why when we're talking about this it is easy to uh slip between those. Um I do want to say that the
um this is one of the the places where we need to acknowledge our own lensing bias, right? And chat this is true as you for you as well, right?
Silkong is massive news in our sphere, right? There are so many people who have never heard of Silk Song, right? Like remember remember
for for a period of time there was probably an adult in your life if you grew up in the right era who called every console a Nintendo.

Same thing, right? Like that the the level of depth that and impact that some of these games have um is relatively minor outside of our nice little myopic gamer bubble, right? And it is games like Call of Duty, Madden, things that do get to do the big splashy marketing spend in put FIFA, right? And
NBA 2K like there is
any number of sports and racing and shooter titles that come out yearly or almost yearly.
Yes.
Um Yeah.
Yeah.
But again, that is not in any way diminishing the indie coolness. It's just part of indie keeping the independent means that almost by definition it isn't a broadreaching game.
Yeah.
Like if you're hitting that aur vision, you're finding a narrower group of people most likely that are going to enjoy it. There are breakouts 100%. But I bet there are less than honestly

25 breakout indie titles of note.
Yep.
Maybe 50.
Yep.
Total over the past 10 or 15 years.
Yeah. Uh interesting. Uh, someone was asking
also because of how hard it is to do really big successful indie.
Yeah.
But also, actually, let me throw my own caveat on that, Will. The great part about being indie is you don't have to be wildly successful,
right? you know, a studio with two or three people that sells, you know, 200,000 copies of a game for 15 bucks each is um bringing in $3 million and has probably paid pretty well for those two or three people for the couple years it took them to make it,
right? Yeah. The the the difference
that would be minuscule for everything else.
Yeah.
Do really well at sustaining a small studio.

Yeah, correct. Yeah. the the the difference in scope also means a difference in the scope of success.
Yeah.
Right. When your scope
are a lot lower.
Yeah. Much easier. Yeah. Than than trying to pay salaries for a thousand people. And also um the uh the number of people you need to support a group of people does not increase linearly with the size of that group of people. It increases somewhere between linearly and exponentially. Right? So like at a certain size you need HR and at a certain size you need um you know more
maybe you need facilities, maybe you suddenly need a healthcare plan,
maybe you need 401k and matching because you have to retain employees, maybe you start needing stock opt because they're all owners most likely.
Yeah. Yeah.
Or you know, like it's just it's

different feels,
right? Okay. So, then let's ask another really fun question.
All right. I like fun questions.
It's a great qu I'm I'm very I'm very happy with this question. I think you you put this in our notes.
Can an indie game
Mhm.
have a sequel?
Oh, yeah.
I So, by all of our definitions, I think the answer is yes. But something in me is like hiccoping on that, right? Just a little bit like a penny out of small studio working on Settlers of Katon the brand
be considered an indie game and I think it's pretty quickly no the Katon license alone makes it not indie.
Right.
Yeah.
Is it right? Is there is there anything different about a sequel? Right. cuz like I I think I think we're still good, but I'm wondering why I have this internal hiccup on the idea of like an indie franchise.

Can they make a sequel and it still be considered an indie game?
Yeah.
Like let's let's qualify that more. An indie group can absolutely make a sequel. That gets done all the time.
Yeah.
Can they make an in or should we let's see did we say successful? Maybe should it be, you know,
what a successful sequel?
Because I could absolutely see an indie group putting out version, you know, game one, two, three, and four on a moderately successful series and still being indie all the way down,
right?
But, you know, Hades 2. Um,
well, that that is that is a that's a studio that I have avoided mentioning on purpose because I don't know how I feel about that. Super Giant Games is in this very weird quasi indie space where they're a little big to be an indie and a little too wellunded to be an indie but also definitely nail the indie aesthetic and like mindset

and that's that's really weird. Like Super Giant Games is weird, right? like
and again just throwing them out as the there's always exceptions but you know does Team Cherry who put out a very successful indie game is putting out a sequel to that can that even because the first game was so successful does that remove indie the indie tag automatically from the next thing
because the second game
regardless of what else it has has some amount of clout and more capacity to get out recognition. Yeah, it has brand recognition and the brand recognition may be a thing that catapults it to a kind of non-indy status,
right? And it goes back like if my artistic sensibility definition is what we go with, then an indie studio with a successful game could put out a sequel that maintains that. But I think it's harder to do. I I think it's yeah, I

think it's easy to lose sight. And I uh I saw I saw a comment in chat that said um I it's it's hitting for me because I often have a fear that sequels will lose the magic that made the first one work and be like just a shameless attempt to cash in on having a successful franchise character recognition, all that, right? And that's certainly true to some extent, but I think the um
it's kind of I know what it is. It's kind of like Souls likes. Okay,
follow me down this rabbit hole.
Okay,
lots of Souls likes have no idea what makes Dark Souls good. Not all of them. There are some excellent Souls likes. Lots of them though have no idea why Dark Souls is hard. What the purpose of flasks is, why dodge roll gives you eye frames. There's a whole bunch and like what the relationship between the build that you choose to use and eyeframes is like a lot of them haven't done that. They've

just kind of slapped a pastiche of like ah yes we have difficult combat and flasks check please where souls like right. It feels like in some cases sequels get into this thing where they become like the first game in the series, but they amp up all of the wrong bits and miss and stop having the vision and the feeling that's very tight. That econ that economy, right? Like that makes the first game so indie. and they lose it in favor of something bigger and grander and they overscale their indie roots, right? And I think it's not always that it can't be indie, it's just that they frequently aren't.
And I think part of getting that indie feel, the aesthetic we talked about before involves, and I'm going to use this in the best way possible, a certain amount of hunger, like wanting to prove yourself, wanting to make something that

people like stand out and notice. And that's harder to do the better funded and the more people you have like it just
small scrappy team feels hunger in a different way than large well financed team
right
and again they this is purely for that indie gut that indie feel I think it is hard for a large well financed team to come in with that hunger that in some way shines through into the development of the game
right um hold on I have a question. I have a question. I have a question. I'm going to look at a thing.
Okay.
Yeah. Okay. Great. Awesome. It's the problem with Subnotica 2.
Oh, okay.
Subnotica 1 probably in Indie. If if if we're going to say that Hollow Knight's in Indie, Subnotica 1 only has 112 professional credits in it. It's it's actually not that many more. Now, granted, bigger scale, slightly

different. It's probably on the upper end of Indie if we're going to call it indie at all. But like the thing with Subnotica 2 where it's been like completely derailed because the creative talent didn't want to focus on the thing arguably allegedly, right? And now there's this huge lawsuit that's taken all the air out of the room and it sucks for all the developers and all the fans of the game's going to get delayed for 12 billion years and never exist and evaporate into vapor, right? That feels like the kind of miss that you're talking about where like they lose the the focus, right? You did the You caught lightning in a bottle. Great. Now do it again.
Mhm.
Wait, but I don't know how I did it the first time. It was an accident. Doesn't matter. You got to do it again.
And that I think really well leads into that a lot of indies that we hear about with the big medium to big games.
Honestly got lucky. And I don't mean lucky lucky, but they got lucky. They made the right game at the right time and it got in front of the right people to get promoted to spread around enough. and they like their set of skills were exactly right for making what they did,

but they're not actually able to repeat.
Yes.
That on any other game. And this is you see this with writers. You see this with I mean with a whole bunch of different things with musicians with one hit wonders that um it can be a hard thing to replicate.
Right. I'm going to I'm going to I've got some examples.
Hear me. So, for an example of a game that got lucky,
Among Us,
Among Us was has been out for a very long time and only and got lucky, right, in that a bunch of streamers started playing it together during the pandemic, right? And then went from being like a tiny team that nobody knew to being like this huge thing where now they're collaborating with uh Genshin Impact and Pon is coming to Among Us. I'm not kidding. I saw the ad. It was weird, deeply unsettling, but it is happening, right? Like that kind of thing. And

Among Us is kind of weird because it's quasi live service. Um, but like for an example, like the getting lucky, right? They had a game. It It's a fine game. It's never been a bad game. It just didn't find its core audience until the right circumstances caused it to come uh into uh like into the spotlight.
Yeah. And you see this from India all the way up to big like actually I'd argue Niantic the people who made Pokemon Go like they had a moderately successful ARG like I just wrote a short about this that aired on YouTube Pokemon Go blew up for right place right time but really right brand and right the lack of letative narrative dissonance um or ludo narrative dissonance like in the Pokemon manga and books and TV you wander around outside throw balls at small critters catch them like you do exactly the same thing when you're walking with your phone that didn't work with Harry Potter, Jurassic Park, like
all of these other games
that it just people were they didn't get

it. It
it and it's also so funny to me cuz I think the comments for that short also demonstrate some of the uh some of the bias that we have towards recognizing indie games in ways that like external forces don't. I the number of comments I've seen that ask about Ingress
Mhm. when Ingress is not relevant outside of a very narrow community. It's not relevant in the larger world because it's not Pokemon Go, right? Is kind of a is also part of it, right? That like
Ingress on its best days, I don't think ever got 1% of the players that Pokémon Go did.
Correct. Yeah. Exactly. Yes. Richard has it exactly right. What's an Ingress?
Yeah. Correct.
And so like so even big even companies midsize companies that strive like there are plenty of studios. This isn't an indie exclusive thing, but I think it is more almost I'll say tragic with indies who put out something that gets picked up and then really have a lot they're like, "Oh, I can go make the next one." And just bounce their head against walls

because they are still a small team often still with limited resources.
Yep.
And getting distracted. Uh, sorry. My dashboard for YouTube has decided it no longer wishes to participate in existence. So, just keep going. And I'm gonna keep troubleshooting why I can't see YouTube dashboard. It's fine. It's everything's fine. I'm just internally screaming, keep going.
But, um, and this kind of gets to one of the last parts I think I'll bring up. You know, the difference between consumerf facing definitions and industryfacing definitions. For example, you know, most consumers would call the Latro ind uh indie despite it being published by Playstack. You know, it is a published game. It's still indie. So even if you're like hey India's you know lack of a publisher they still be like well belatro you know they talk about this and you know David the diver being published by Mint Rocket um

was you know accused of not being indie because of the outside funding even though kind of the team size and the drive and the hunger was there.
It also and and I think a lot of people brought this up in chat it also really failed on scope. It likes it super failed bond scope. Uh because it scope crept itself into oblivion with too many mini games.
Oh. Um
have you ever played memory today? Will
Yeah.
Amazingly wellunded Kickstarter game that um
Yeah.
No Man's Sky. There we go.
Did No Man's Sky Kickstart?
I mean, not No. Um what was the what's the game? What's the game that raised hundreds of millions of dollars through initially crowdfunding and then
Star Citizen?
Yeah, maybe that one.
Star Citizen's the one that's uh sort of exists but has just continued to sell people virtual spaceships that may never exist. Yeah. Okay, great. Yeah.
Star Citizen. Is Star Citizen indie?
No.
Why not?

I've seen how much money they've made. No.
Well, how did did they start off as indie? I would say they did until their Kickstarter finished.
Okay.
And then they scope crept themselves out of existence. They had a good idea.
Scope creep. And that reminded me of Star Citizen, which sounded initially as they were coming in with an outside group and a small scrappy team and we're going to raise money from the fans. We're going to go make this game you've all wanted that just it is it is a weird industry.
Yeah. Yeah. But I really think indie is an aesthetic that has to be pulled off by a small team. Again, always aster caveats. Has to be pulled off by a small team to get that focus direction and is a game that does not go wide, but instead goes narrow and deep and delivers that experience with the solid indie title. Yeah, I think it doesn't I think it makes no

because of its scope.
I think indie titles never try to lay claim to more of your time
than the game like humbly asks for. Right. Like I can't think of an indie title that's like a live service with like daily check-ins.
Yeah. I mean some of them though on the time like you take slay the spire or monster train like
our sickness regarding rogue lights with dailies does not stand for a general stand in for indies.
Okay.
Okay. To be fair, right, Jeff and I have both put too much too too much time into those games. It's fine. Um
yeah, I don't know. It's it and I think that this is a good I feel like this is the kind of thing that I really like what we get to do here, right? That we get to sit down and try and hammer out an understanding rather than a definition because
it's it would be really easy to try and

slap a definition on indie and then I would immediately pop out of my trash panda can over there and be like, "Excuse me, have you thought about?" And I would list some weird indie title, right? And we'd have to work out exceptions, right? But like this feeling of it needs to have all of these elements. It needs to have this feeling. It needs also and this is another weird one that we can get to and I know we're trying to wrap up. I just wanted to interject this real quick because it occurred to me while I was trying to fix our dashboard which is now
we have time.
Um it's about the relationship between the game and the public.
Okay. Tell me more on that.
Okay. Indie games have a very unique relationship with the way they generally speaking accept feedback and approach modding and social media and art and um you know fan creations and

the way that those creators interact with the the space, right? Like I've never had a AAA games dev pop into chat and be like, "Hey, I made that game." Right? But I have for solo dev projects, right? When like there are fewer people who worked on the solo dev project by definition than the big project
and one of their buddies on Discord's like, "Hey, these streamers are talking about your game." It's like, "Oh, okay."
Correct.
Yes. It's that relationship. And I think that kind of encapsulates it. But I also agree that this is another feeling thing about the way that they approach having a fan base versus something like, I don't know, Borderlands 4 where Randy Pitchford goes, "Our game's worth $80 and you should pay more than $80 for it." Thus demonstrating that he's never talked to their community manager who was silently sitting behind him going, "Shut up. Shut up. God, please shut up. Shut up. Shut up." Right? That feels like another example

of sort of the ideological differences that like split those up.
Yeah,
I understand Randy though. I mean like the studio director who's had to get the funding is like we just spent $300 million making this
right. I understand why Randy thinks that and why he wants people to believe that. But the way he communicated it was but
Oh 100%.
Yeah, 100%. Um, I think that's going to do it for our conversation today. Chat, what uh in the comments below, I'm actually going to be an intelligent YouTuber and I'm going to put a pinned comment asking you what your favorite indie game is uh in the in the comments. So, look for that pinned comment. Leave me a little note with what your favorite indie game is. Um, we'll be back next week with
we don't TBD
TBD. We don't know yet, but please look forward to Design Club next week. Also, if you're wondering about more first reactions of Silk Song and all of this week's gaming and tech news, please join me and Matt on Monday for breakfast.

We'll be joining uh we'll be bringing you as always a healthy helping of breakfast news Monday 11:00 a.m. Eastern, 8 a.m. Pacific. So, please join us for that. Any other closing thoughts, Jeff? Any other big
I enjoyed this discussion. This was a fun one in chat on both YouTube and Twitch
for Brad and Janet. Thank you so much. This was good good comments today.
Yeah, absolutely. I will see all of you next time. Until then, uh, say bye to the people, Jeff.
Bye to the people, Jeff. [Music]