Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is up for 12 awards, making it the most nominated game in the awards’ history, followed by PlayStation titles Death Stranding 2: On the Beach and Ghost of Yotei with eight nominations each, and Hades 2 with six.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is up for 12 awards, making it the most nominated game in the awards’ history, followed by PlayStation titles Death Stranding 2: On the Beach and Ghost of Yotei with eight nominations each, and Hades 2 with six.
We’ve gotta figure out some rules for what “indie” means. E33 is a great game, but that budget is estimated to be least $20 million. How many small teams are not being honored because a spot is being taken up by a game that has the same budget as a small AAA project?
A small AAA production in 2000, maybe. E33’s was only a fraction of a small AAA budget today.
TGA calls it “a game made outside the traditional publisher system,” which fits. I’d agree that we’re looking at wildly different scales of production in the same category, though.
Indie doesn’t and hasn’t ever had anything to do with budget.
Indie has always been a way to define a category for creators without access to the same amount of money that publishers had historically provided. Now publishers are both no longer needed to release a game and are very rarely taking chances on original games from first time developers.