What's An Indie Game Anyway? - Collider

Ten years ago, critics and gaming enthusiasts regularly talked about “indie games,” but the expression was mainly unknown to the general public. Nowadays, everyone has their own list of favorite indie games, with special tags on online stores dedicated to them, and even prizes celebrating the most notable indie titles on The Game Awards. However, with the indie revolution comes a problem: No one seems to agree on what, exactly, defines an indie game.

The problem with the video game industry is that it’s somewhat new compared to other media. As a society, we are still testing the limits of video game development, and in the meanwhile, we create words to help us define the thousands of titles we find in the market. “Indie” became a label of its own, but the term is so broadly used that it becomes hard to know what it exactly means. That’s why we’ll dive into the many ways “indie” is used to define games, discussing how these definitions can help us understand what an indie game really is.

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Developer and Publisher

Image via Nintendo

There are two main steps in creating a video game: First, you've got to develop the game itself. Then, once the game is ready, you need to actually sell it. Game development is really fun, but we've all got to eat, so selling your game is almost half the work.

For the development part, a team (or a single person) only needs to have an idea and enough resources to program, design, compose sounds, and create visual assets. A game can be built through several years, but if you try to make a living out of it, the best way to go is to have programmers, artists, and musicians by your side, who should all be paid appropriately for their work. In other words, game development demands a lot of time and a lot of money, and the more money you have, the less time you’ll need to put into building a game. And that’s even before worrying about a legal team, accountancy, and marketing. That's where publishers come in.

Publishers are companies responsible for financing the project, taking care of marketing, reaching out to journalists who can review the game, and even taking care of legal issues. A publisher, then, is responsible for everything that’s not directly involved with the game development itself. Traditionally, distributors hold a large part of the profits from the sale of games, and AAA publishers even own the copyright of the games they’ve funded. It’s not even unlikely that a game idea comes first from a publisher who owns a certain IP, which then hires a studio to develop the project.

Image via Sony Interactive Entertainment

The God of War IP, for instance, belongs to Sony, even if Santa Monica Studios developed the four main games of the franchise. That means the God of War franchise belongs to Sony, a publisher that paid for the studio's work but can actually hire a different developer for the franchise’s next game. As another example, although Rocksteady Studio created the Batman: Arkham franchise, the rights to the games remain with WarnerMedia. Warner went on to create its own game development studio, WB Games Montreal, which took the Rocksteady franchise and developed Batman: Arkham Origins, the worst game in the series. While Rocksteady is now developing a Suicide Squad game, WB Games Montreal will return to Batman: Arkham universe with the upcoming Gotham Knights.

A publisher, then, can hire studios, buy studios, and even create their studios. The main goal of a publisher, however, is to sell a game. When a big publisher is involved, it’s also a standard practice that developers discuss design ideas with the marketing team so that the game can sell as many copies as possible. This is how the AAA industry works, not much different from the blockbuster film production.

But what if you're a small developer? If you are working on your first game project, chances are publishers will not throw money in your direction. That means you’ll have to handle all the work that a publisher does and sell your game yourself. Not having a publisher also means you get to keep the copyrights of everything you create. Video games are an art form, but they are also profitable media products. Keeping the copyright over your work is not only a way to protect your ideas but also allow you to explore your work in the future to make more money with sequels, remakes, or spin-offs. We could say that if there’s no publisher involved, the developers keep their independence. And that’s where the term “indie game” originally comes from.

The first way to use the term indie game, then, is this: when the developer also takes care of publishing and marketing their own game, also keeping their IP. Cuphead was developed and published by Studio MDHR, Spelunky by Mossmouth, Super Meat Boy by Team Meat, and Braid by Number None. These are all indie games for sure, and no one can dispute that. But what if we take another classic indie game, like Supergiant Game’s Bastion? Why is Bastion considered independent if Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment published it?

No Money, No Interference

Image via Supergiant games

When Supergiant Games was creating its first title, Bastion, it struck a rare deal for small developers: get Warner to act as a publisher. However, even with Warner’s seal, Bastion is often praised as one of the main games to usher in the indie revolution. The reason why Bastion is defined as an indie, even if Warner originally published the game, is that Supergiant Games refused any financial support for developing the game. Warner took care of marketing and distribution, but the team of Supergiant Games funded the game themselves in order to keep the copyright of Bastion and have total creative freedom. Warner, then, only offered its publishing services for a cut of Bastion’s profits.

We have, now, a second definition of “indie game” that is widely used in the industry: a game remains independent if the publisher doesn’t fund its development. With two valid ways of defining indie games, it’s expected people will disagree. There are still people who will see the presence of a publisher as proof a game is not independent, and in this case, Bastion could not be called indie. However, what if instead of signing a deal with Warner, Supergiant Games decided to pay a marketing agency from their own pockets? There would be no publisher in that scenario, so Bastion would certainly be defined as an indie game. But if Warner didn’t fund Bastion, didn’t buy its copyrights, and didn’t intervene in the development process, what’s the actual difference between using a publisher and hiring a marketing agency?

Image via Supergiant Games

For Supergiant Games, the Warner deal was better because it allowed them to share profits for marketing instead of paying it in advance. Nevertheless, the studio didn’t lose its independence, because the publisher did not help fund the game’s development and had no power to interfere with the studios’ choices.

The presence of a publisher, then, might not be enough for defining a game as an indie game or not. Square Enix, for example, created the Collective platform in 2016 to help marketing indie projects in search of crowdfunding. The rules of the platform are clear: Square Enix will not give money to developers, but if the project gets enough votes, developers are allowed to use Square Enix's seal for marketing their crowdfunding campaign. If the crowdfunding is successful, Square Enix offers to publish the game in exchange for a small share of the profits. And so, without major contractual obligations and no copyright loss, a prominent publisher helps indie games like ThroughLine Games’ Forgotton Anne see the light of day. But what if the studio gets money from the publisher? Does it necessarily stop being independent?

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Creative Control

Image via Devolver Digital

Forget AAA companies, such as Ubisoft and Nintendo; let’s focus on publishers specialized in marketing indie games, such as Devolver Digital, Team 17, and Raw Fury. Often, these publishers help to fund the development of games, giving money directly to developers. Why, then, are games from these companies still called “indie”? Things start to get really complicated from now on.

Imagine you want to develop a game. You’ll need to dedicate a few months, or even years, to build a commercial title. How can you pay your bills while still working on your game? You might have a wealthy family member who supports your dream, you might try keeping a day job at the cost of extending development time, or you might get a loan from the bank. In all these cases, getting money from an external source doesn’t take away your creative control, nor do you lose the copyrights of your creation. You remain independent, you just borrowed some money.

Image via Raw Fury

Publishers specializing in indie games offer similar services. These publishers fund projects in exchange for a share in the profits, but they are still not involved in developing the game itself. It’s an intelligent commercial strategy: The indie market is booming, so if publishers allow developers to keep creative control, they can still profit a lot without actually worrying about the development itself. So, we now have a third possible definition for “indie game”: a game that, no matter how it was funded, was still developed by a team that kept their creative freedom and copyrights of their work. It's a broad definition, for sure, but one that helps to pinpoint the main characteristic of “indie games”: They are bursting with creativity because there’s no external agent trying to interfere with the development.

Does it really matter where the money to pay for the project comes from? It’s because indie games can be defined this way that EA launched its Originals initiative, through which the AAA publisher entirely funds game projects that are still marketed as “indie.” EA doesn’t even keep a share of the profits of an Originals game, and only takes back the money they spend during development, to make sure these studios can remain independent in as many senses as possible. But can we really define projects involving teams of hundreds of people and millions of dollars “indie”? Well, there’s a fourth way to define an indie game.

Indie Game as a Cultural Definition

Image via Moon Studios

The definition of indie games, for some people, is not about funding and publishing. The term “indie game” is often used to define everything that’s not mainstream. Games developed by big companies to sell millions of copies could never be indie, while niche games developed by small teams definitely are. The issue with this definition is that it uses the public perception of how big a project is, and we all know that marketing is a great tool for changing how we see things.

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Games such as Ori and the Will of the Wisps are often defined as “indie,” even if Moon Studios is actually owned by Microsoft. Ori looks indie, and Moon Studios maintains a small team working on their games. But if they don’t keep their copyright, and if they actually need to answer to someone above them in the company’s hierarchy, can they still be considered independent? So far, Microsoft seems to be willing to give their studios all the creative freedom they want. But would this posture remain if sales were not high enough?

Let’s take another example. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice was developed by Ninja Theory with no external funding. Ninja Theory also published their own game. So even by the most limiting definition of indie, which claims no publisher can be involved in the process, Hellblade is still an indie game. It might be weird, though, to think of a multimillion-dollar project involving hundreds of employees as an independent project. That’s why some people defend that Hellblade is not indie.

Image via Ninja Theory

However, if we take the definition that an indie game must be “small,” where exactly do we cross the line? How many people must work on a project for it to be considered indie? Four? Five? And what about funding? What’s the max budget a game can have to be indie still? What if a crowdfunding campaign goes better than predicted and a single-person team makes millions of dollars? Does the game stops being indie? Lastly, what is mainstream anyway? PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds started as a small project, but soon the game became such a massive success that it launched a new wave of battle royale fever. If public perception is indeed the rule to define indie games, PUGB would have started as an indie and then stopped being independent. This is also a dangerous definition because it can lead to the conclusion that an indie game cannot be highly successful.

The cultural definition of an indie game is confusing and imprecise because it is highly subjective, incapable of creating a rule everyone can use for analysis. Even so, this is still a common way of discussing indie titles, as players and critics alike use their own perception of what’s mainstream to define the limits of the indie industry. Nevertheless, this kind of definition is so broad that marketing teams can sell “small” games with indie makeup, even if AAA companies actually own them.

The discussion of what an indie game is has been going on for years, and it will certainly last much longer. The biggest source of disagreement is that we don’t define what we actually mean when we use “indie game” to describe a project. Of course, we all have our preferences, but we should be aware of the many different ways a popular term is used for the sake of a constructive discussion. We hope this brief introduction to the debate can be of service the next time you argue with a stranger on your favorite gaming forum.

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