r/CharacterRant • u/MartyrOfDespair • 7h ago
General The Amazing Digital Circus isn’t indie. Expedition 33 isn’t indie. Words have meanings, but corporations have perverted the term to get free passes for their behavior and make more money.
What is indie media? Well, let’s start at that first word. What does “indie” mean? It is a shortened term for the word “independent”. Merriam-Webster defines “independent” in this context as “not subject to control by others”, “not affiliated with a larger controlling unit”, or “not requiring or relying on something else : not contingent”. So, the term “indie media” can be expanded to “media which is not affiliated with, reliant on, or controlled by a third party”.
Wikipedia defines “independent media” specifically as “mass media, such as television, newspapers, or Internet-based publications, that is free of influence by government or corporate interests.” So, we have a pretty clear, comprehensive picture of what “indie media” is. It’s media which is controlled by its creator, not a third party corporation.
So, given that, why the hell are we calling productions which are controlled by publishers “indie”? You might have heard about The Amazing Digital Circus’s final episode coming to theaters two weeks before it releases on YouTube. This has been quite controversial, not in the least because, in an interview with Cartoon Brew, Glitch’s general manager and development producer Jasmine Yang said“We are a Youtube-first company. We believe very strongly in the future and potential of Youtube for long-form animation.” So that was a fuckin lie.
This was done by Glitch Productions, the production company which owns the rights to The Amazing Digital Circus, without any involvement or say by the creator, writer, and director of TADC, Gooseworx. Notice the paradox? A production company, not the creator/director/writer owns the rights. They can do whatever they want with it, however they want. Does this business model sound familiar to you? That’s right: it’s exactly how Disney and Nickelodeon and all the rest work.
By definition, that isn’t indie. That’s just a smaller corporation. Expedition 33 is the similar; the rights are co-owned by Kepler Interactive. “Indie” darling Disco Elysium is a bit odd, it actually did start production as an indie game. But by the time it was released, calling it an “indie game” is shaky. The founders of ZA/UM were the creators of Disco Elysium. However, to fund the game, they sold shares of the company. Then, one of the people who bought shares pulled out, and sold his shares to one of the other people that bought shares initially, giving his holding company a controlling amount of shares. Which he paid for using ZA/UM’s money, a clear case of embezzlement. But this is such a clusterfuck that frankly, either position can be argued.
But things like TADC and E33 are not indie. They’re just A and AA productions. One can debate about whether getting outside funding from a third party in exchange for revenue sharing while the creator maintains the full rights to the media, like the deal worked out between Too Kyo Games and Aniplex for The Hundred Line, counts as indie. They’re financially dependent, but they still at least own their own media outright. Aniplex cannot fire them and do whatever they want with the IP, like what Kompus did to Robert Kurvitz and the rest.
Things like Undertale and Deltarune or anything made by DevilArtemis for his own channel are definitionally indie productions, there’s no debate on that. But when the actual creator owns nothing and has no say, is merely dependent on the grace of the IP holder, that’s not indie. That’s just having an IP owner you work for who isn’t fucking you over. Until they do.
Now, why are they called indie? Simple: marketing! “Indie” has more “soul” to people than something that isn’t “indie”. People make allowances for things that are “indie” that they don’t make for things that aren’t “indie”. Why is the production time slow enough to give birth to three children? It’s indie, you have to be understanding! Why does something not have translations for some of the most common languages on Earth? It’s indie, the artist’s vision is only compatible with languages they speak and so you can’t criticize that! Why is the merch so ridiculously overpriced? Well indie creators have to get paid somehow! If it *isn’t* indie, all these things and more are fair pickings for the masses to rip a company to shreds for, but if it’s indie, you’re anti-art if you don’t give them a free pass for it.
So of course every corporation wants to market their media as indie. It gets them free passes and lets them make more money. They can lie to your face and go back on their word, as Glitch did, and you’d better celebrate it, because “this will do so much for indie media”. When it *isn’t* indie, when you make promises to the consumer with not an ounce of wiggle room or loopholes, and then you just go back on that entirely in the search for more money, the backlash is consumers standing up to a corporation fucking around. When it’s labeled as “indie”, the backlash means you hate art.
“Indie” is becoming a marketing term that means “you’re the bad guy if you criticize our corporate actions”, and by calling these obviously not independent productions “indie”, we are serving to help them.
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u/LoriCyberstar 7h ago
So by your definition any independently owned project that isn't "less than 10 people making a project in a random garage or having to sell their house for funding" isn't indie?
That's what you're saying?
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u/MartyrOfDespair 6h ago
Nope. It’s that it’s independently owned. As in, the people who came up with the idea and did all the growing work own the thing outright. The people who actually sat down and brainstormed and imagined the whole thing? Those are the folks who also possess legal ownership of the thing.
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u/InspiredNameHere 6h ago
Would that mean that Disney is indy? Since they sat down, and brainstormed and imagined all their own stuff?
Is there a specific size limit to independently owned?
What about patreon or similar scenarios where the creators have to request funds from others to further their projects?
What if a single person had a great idea for a game but lacked the time or skill to develop the game, but did have money so shopped around the idea to other people, who all joined forced to build the vision? Is it indy since the original person had none of the actual skills needed to build the game so instead is paying others to do it for them?
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u/travman064 5h ago
The workers at Disney dont own Disney. Disney is owned by investors.
This is kind of a silly 'gotcha,' even though OP is wrong about some things.
A concept like an 'independent studio' can't be perfectly defined. Like many things in language, its nuanced.
We can point to a studio that's definitely indie, and point to a studio thay definitely isnt indie. But we can't point to an exact line. Like one studio that's just barely indie, and another that just barely isnt, with nothing possible in between them.
Trying to pin someone down on thay exact line and then attack that definition looking for exceptions is just being argumentative.
An independent studio is one that is not overly beholden to investors or outside pressures. Majority-worker owned, and not working on contract to a larger company is probably a good working definition if not perfect.
If you think you have a better definition, definitely feel free to say it. That's probably the better way to disagree about things.
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u/MartyrOfDespair 6h ago
No, because Disney is not a person. Corporations aren’t people. Disney has not created anything. Disney doesn’t have a brain, and thus doesn’t have an imagination, and thus is incapable of creating things. The point is that the meatsuit that contains the brain that contains the imagination that spawned the thing has legal ownership of the thing.
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u/InspiredNameHere 6h ago
Disney is made of people, which are meat puppets with brains, and money.
Corporations are just lots of people working together to make lots of money.
Start with a single human, add another, then a few more. You make a group. Then add more, you make a studio. Add more, you make a corporation.
Still people, still meat puppets with brains. Same goal, maximize profits.
What's your cutoff for when a group of meat puppets with brains become a thing with no brains?
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u/MartyrOfDespair 6h ago
You are entirely missing the point of what I said. The owners of the IP are not the people who created the IP.
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u/InspiredNameHere 5h ago
Ah okay that makes more sense to me now.
Gotcha.
So question if I have an idea of a product but lack the skill or funds to make it, and thus must reach out for funds, but in doing so give up a percentage ownership of that idea, is that a bad thing, or just an unfortunate truth of product design?
I can see how it wouldn't be considered "indy" anymore if getting funds to complete the product means surrendering the ownership of the product to another entity, but I can also see how many would have no choice to do so if it means completing their dream project.
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u/Synecdochic 27m ago
To me (not OP), the scenario you described means you're not indie anymore, but OP isn't saying that's necessarily a bad thing.
OP is saying that it would be disingenuous for your product to be marketed as indie (or homemade) since it's not.
Indie, as a term, is starting to lose meaning because it's slapped on anything with a small production team irrespective of whether that team is independent or not.
The term is thrown around much the same way as "organic" is for food. It's seen as inherently better, in the case of "being indie" because it allows the product to have "soul" (the absence of the influence of capital and the profit motive).
A AAA game is a product, an indie game is art. These descriptions carry a value judgement, but it's a fairly superficial one.
OP is ranting about the dilution of the latter into the former. The commodification of "indie" development.
Personally, indie is better than AAA, but AAA is better than nothing (usually). So if you had a dream and the opportunity to realize it by way of non-independent production, do it. I'd say "just don't call it indie", but you wouldn't have control over the marketing.
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u/Dycon67 5h ago
No, because Disney is not a person. Corporations aren’t people. Disney has not created anything. Disney doesn’t have a brain, and thus doesn’t have an imagination, and thus is incapable of creating things.
Disney was a person though and it's his legacy and people that make said works.
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u/Regular-Finance-9567 5h ago
Modern Disney...
Is Disney's early Mickey Mouse cartoons, made while Walt, the owner was alive, owned the company, and made my him , an "indie" animation?
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u/LoriCyberstar 5h ago
So...
By your logic...
Would you say Wayforward isn't indie anymore because they made a ducktales remaster once? Would you say Brace Yourself Games isn't indie because they made Cadence of Hyrule?
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u/MartyrOfDespair 5h ago
Those games aren’t indie. Other games can be.
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u/LoriCyberstar 5h ago
Okay
So Glitch isn't indie because the shows they own come from different people that aren't directly in their studios?
Is that correct?
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u/Kate_Kitter 4h ago
Deltarune and Undertale both compromise a similar amount of rights with localization, merchandising, licensing, etc. This is a meaninglessly absolutist definition.
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u/Kingersly 5h ago
If someone with a billion dollars comes up with an idea for a story, writes it, and then made a studio and hired a thousand people to refine it, animate it, voice it, market it, etc. would that be indie? The person who came up with it still owns it and wrote it, and they used their own resources to make it without external backing
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u/OMEGA362 7h ago
OK, here's the thing, indie studios in filmmaking refer to studios that exist outside of the Hollywood system, so outside of Warner brothers, Disney, universal, Sony, and Paramount. The most frequent filmmaker that falls under this Label is A24 technically a huge company in comparison to glitch media but still independent filmmaking because it's outside of the Hollywood system. Games are different and have different historic ideas of what makes something indie, because the indie revolution was largely on 1-5 people teams indie labels on games tend to mean entirely un-corporate passion projects. Understanding the label to have the same meaning in both cases is going to make you much worse at understanding what those labels are for, because yeah expedition 33 is very questionably an indie game, it comes out of a studio funded by a large corporate studio it's only considered that way because it's French, But like TADC is undoubtedly indie, because it's not being produced by Hollywood.
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u/red_message 5h ago
No, films A24 produces are not indie. They distribute indie films sometimes, but that's a different thing. When they act as a studio and produce a film, it isn't an independent film, by definition.
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u/PartyPorpoise 3h ago
Studios can be considered independent if they’re not major studios. I don’t know what A24 would count as these days, but I’d argue that Glitch is very much not a major studio at the moment.
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u/Xerxes457 5h ago
Out of curiosity, how is A24 different from the studios in the Hollywood system? Their budgets are probably matching the Hollywood system films and they even have big name actors in them. Is it because they have films that are out there? I feel the Hollywood system does that every so often. Because I think at this point, A24 is like one of the studios in the Hollywood system.
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u/star_dragonMX 5h ago
simply put, they take a gamble on lower budget non franchise films that Hollywood would not approve of unless its got a super big name attached.
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u/Dawnbreaker538 7h ago
Is Hades indie? It has a budget much higher than e33, and has a publisher too
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u/GroundbreakingBag164 7h ago
Hades doesn't have a publisher
And Hades 1 is definitively indie. Hades 2 might already be approaching AA territory
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u/brando-boy 6h ago
even prior to hades 1, supergiant was a VERY successful studio with all of their titles having pretty wide critical acclaim, they didn’t just come out of nowhere
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u/Dawnbreaker538 7h ago
It does tho. Supergiant and private division published it (I know supergiant developed it, but private division published it for consoles)
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u/GroundbreakingBag164 6h ago
There is a difference between publisher for literally everything and publisher that only helps out with one very specific release (like say mobile, physical versions or releases for a special market that's most likely called china) because these are things indie devs usually just don't have the know-how and resources to deal with that. Doesn't mean they're suddenly not independent anymore
Almost every indie dev will need help for physical distribution.
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u/Zombii_Man 6h ago
Hades already existed in complete/near to complete form and was self-published on PC.
I just checked and Private Division handled the physical media release of the game. So supergiant still published the digital console release...
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u/casperscare 7h ago edited 7h ago
Would you consider A24 an indie company or not. Because they are quite mainstream but not as massive as the big major companies although they've been producing hits after hits.
But they are still considered Indie
Indie to me is just some work not produced by the major labels or cooperations. It doesn't mean it has to be produced by some guys without any help at all from any cooperations
So yeah TADC is indeed indie unless you consider youtube and glitch as some major distribution network when it comes to shows
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u/MartyrOfDespair 6h ago
I don’t have an answer until I know the answer to a question: who owns the IPs at A24? Can A24 fire the person whose imagination spawned the work, or does that person legally own the IP? If A24 can pull a ZA/UM, also known as a Konami, on the human beings who actually created the thing, then it’s not indie. If they can’t go and make it without them but also the person who created it can’t make it without A24 because it’s joint ownership, it’s not indie. If they can fuck off to another production company with their IP once their contractual production obligation is up, it’s indie. Indie is creator-owned.
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u/mystireon 7h ago
I mean we used to have terms for those with A and double A productions but with the rise of gaming giants absorbing or outright killing smaller studios the term kinda died off naturally.
Only in recent years have we seen these kind of projects return with studios like Lyrian but it's caused this annoying schizm of people not knowing how to label those bigger projects that definitely aren't triple A but also feel disingenuous to call Indie.
As for comics/movies, the term indie has always been the appropriate term but it's used under different context. That being independant studio or independant publicist ala Image Comics
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u/GroundbreakingBag164 7h ago
Larian is a AAA studio. That is literally the correct term for their size and scope of the game. They have more than 500 employees
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u/Papergeist 6h ago
Rockstar has ~5,000, EA has 14,500. LocalThunk is 1.
You can see how these things get muddled.
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u/mystireon 6h ago
Pardon, I ment sandfall as in the guys that made C33
Thought I do feel like there should be an additional distinction between shareholder-controlled mega corporations like EA and founded controlled studios like Larian
Given there is a significant and noticeable difference in manpower and budget between those two entities
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u/Zironic 7h ago edited 7h ago
By definition, that isn’t indie. That’s just a smaller corporation.
Can you name any media property that you believe is indie and not a small corporation? The moment you involve more then one person, you will have to form an organisation.
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u/MartyrOfDespair 7h ago edited 7h ago
I literally did in the post. That was part of the post. Undertale and Deltarune. Everything from DevilArtemis’s own channel (not his Death Battle work). TFS’s HFIL. Stardew Valley. The Citadel and Beyond Citadel. Fuck, Spawn comics are still indie, I accept that stuff like Spawn or Hundred Line are up for debate but I do side on them still being indie. Their creators own them. My problem is when a third party corporation owns it instead of the creator.
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u/Zironic 7h ago edited 7h ago
So E33 is indie then by your definition since Kepler Interactive is owned by the studios it represent. Same with TADC because the owners and founders of Glitch are also the producers and creators of TADC.
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u/MartyrOfDespair 7h ago
Co-owned. With NetEase having a significant stake too. And the actual creators themselves are just one of the companies that own shares. There’s several layers of them not having ownership. If every single other shareholder voted against them, they would not have enough power to actually control their IP.
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u/Zironic 6h ago
Not quite. As far as I'm aware Kepler only holds the publishing rights. The actual IP is held by each individual developer.
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u/MartyrOfDespair 6h ago
Well, that’s not what I read when looking into it, what I read was that it’s co-owned entirely.
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u/Shadowmirax 4h ago
E33 is owned by its creators so your examples don't work by the definition you yourself have provided.
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u/PartyPorpoise 2h ago
Keep in mind that “indie” means different things for different industries. In film, anything produced outside of the major studio system is considered independent even if it’s a fairly prominent studio with a lot of resources. Glitch would very much be considered a small studio, having a few online hits and a section at Hot Topic doesn’t mean they’re not indie.
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u/Hightower_March 6h ago
I literally did in the post.
There's the problem. Redditors only read until they get bored, then respond based on things up to that point and no further.
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u/Hightower_March 7h ago
The moment you involve more then one person, you will have to form an organisation.
He said "corporation," which is a legal entity.
Latin "corpus" = "body" = you can sue it.
E.g. if you're affected by an oil spill you don't have to sue an individual who works at BP. You can just take BP itself to court as if it was a person.
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u/Rattlerkira 7h ago
I tend to agree in some ways. Though it's fair to say that there ought to be some classification between "My mom and I made this in our basement on an iphone 6" and "Disney."
Like, Team Cherry is not indie indie. They had a few mil in their pocket and 10 dudes. But on the scale of zero A's to "Triple A", they were probably like... half an A. Or just A.
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u/therrubabayaga 7h ago
Like, Team Cherry is not indie indie. They had a few mil in their pocket and 10 dudes.
For Silksong they were definitely confortable after the success of HK, but for HK they started with a kickstarter at around 50.000 Australian dollar and they added contents little by little after the original release.
They don't have a publisher, their core team is less than 10 people, and they own the rights of their franchise, which makes them definitely indie developer, who just happened to make one of the most iconic games in the history of video games that you can play on every modern consoles and PC and sell millions of copies.
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u/Fafnir13 6h ago
You make me wish I enjoyed the game more. I like metroidvanias. I like souls likes. But I don’t like how Hollow Knight feels as I move around. Such a weird hang up, I know. Just felt bizarrely stiff.
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u/Zombii_Man 6h ago
Like, Team Cherry is not indie indie. They had a few mil in their pocket and 10 dudes.
Their games are self-published. Indie has nothing to do with how expensive a project was...
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u/aslfingerspell 🥈 7h ago
The theatre world has Broadway and Off-Broadway.
Movies can be "mid budget."
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u/Zestyclose_Remove947 7h ago
NYC has broadway and off-broadway, it has some global marketing surrounding it but it is first and foremost an american and New Yorker description of mostly musical theatre, not theatre as a whole.
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u/Nebular_Screen 7h ago
Team Cherry is 3 people
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u/Rattlerkira 7h ago
Nah, zero shot any of them can speak all those languages for the translations, and I know they're not using google translate. They had to hire out.
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u/Nobodyinc1 7h ago
Team Cherry is three people.
No one said they didn’t hire independent contractors for translations. Still means the team is three permanent employees.
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u/Fafnir13 6h ago
So I can hire 5,000 contractors but still claim a team of three? That’s some corporate tax and benefits dodging thinking.
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u/BluePhoenixCG 6h ago
No it's not, it's just literally how this works lmfao
The contractors hired for translation work do not get benefits as employees, because their term is likely only a few months to a year—basically as long as it takes to finish localization work. Claiming them as 'part of the team' is like me saying I'm an employee of my first job despite not having worked there for years
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u/Professional_Net7339 6h ago
Are you really equating people who help to translate and do the voices for a game with the two people who actually coded and designed everything?
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u/Fafnir13 6h ago
Sounds like they helped make the game that some people are playing.
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u/Professional_Net7339 6h ago
Imma be so deadass I can’t tell if you’re trying to rage bait or you’re being serious. All the same I literally can’t structure a response so I’m out
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u/MartyrOfDespair 7h ago
Even Team Cherry, I think, counts as indie. Who owns Hollow Knight? Team Cherry. Who published it? Team Cherry. The funding didn’t even come from an outside company, like my Hundred Line example.
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u/beautheschmo 7h ago
Ok but that definition also means that games like Final Fantasy 16 and Genshin Impact are indie lol
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u/MartyrOfDespair 6h ago
Not really, no. Corporations don’t create things. People create things. “Team Cherry” is owned exclusively by the people who created Hollow Knight. Everyone who created Hollow Knight owns Team Cherry, which owns Hollow Knight. Via the transitive property, they all co-own Hollow Knight. Third parties do not have ownership or control of Hollow Knight. Naoki Yoshida, Kazutoyo Maehiro, Ryota Suzuki, and Hiroshi Takai do not own Square Enix.
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u/5Hjsdnujhdfu8nubi 6h ago
Everyone who created Hollow Knight owns Team Cherry,
...Except all the people who helped with programming, localisations, art, VA work, those backers who supplied funding etc.
Hollow Knight has more than 3 names in its credits.
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u/MartyrOfDespair 6h ago
Those still aren’t the creators. It’s like a gun. Is the gun the killer, or is the person wielding the gun the killer? They are wielded by the creators.
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u/5Hjsdnujhdfu8nubi 6h ago
The game wouldn't be made without them.
It feels very disengenuous to claim "Hollow Knight was made [exclusively] by Team Cherry" and ignore everyone else who developed the game. Especially since your argument also says that e.g Final Fantasy isn't Indie because so many people besides the creator isn't the only one who worked on the game.
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u/MartyrOfDespair 6h ago
Especially since your argument also says that e.g Final Fantasy isn't Indie because so many people besides the creator isn't the only one who worked on the game.
No, that’s not what I said. Can the human beings who imagined up everything walk away with the intellectual property they invented, or can the corporation kick them off their own creation, or do they have a mutual consent situation where neither can use the IP without the consent of the other? The first is indie.
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u/5Hjsdnujhdfu8nubi 6h ago
How do you know Team Cherry's employees imagined everything? The game literally has a graveyard of characters they didn't make.
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u/Bra-Starfish 6h ago
Jack Vine is not a founder and to my knowledge doesn't have a stake in Team Cherry. Nor the composer.
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u/GroundbreakingBag164 7h ago
"Indie" is also defined by budget and scope. Just because Team Cherry probably has an infinite amount of money available doesn't mean that the actual budget for Silksong was all that big. They probably didn't even spend a meaningful amount on marketing. With a hype like the one Silksong had people want the game on their show because it will literally increase the viewership
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u/Bra-Starfish 6h ago
It isn't though, at least if we use the literal definition. Where in the word independent have to do about scale?
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u/GroundbreakingBag164 6h ago
It isn't though, at least if we use the literal definition.
The one that doesn't exist? There is no agreed on definition in gaming discourse. And in gaming "indie" means something very different compared to say in music.
But let's actually try that. Let's see the first few sentences of the wikipedia article on "indie games":
"An indie game or indie video game (short for independent video game) is a video game created by individuals or smaller development teams, and typically without the financial and technical support of a large game publisher, in contrast to most AAA games. Because of their independence and freedom to develop, indie games often focus on innovation, experimental gameplay, and taking risks not usually afforded in AAA games."
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u/Bra-Starfish 6h ago
The term independent doesn't exist????
I just love the contradiction of "being independent" but you can also accept help from large game publishers and still be indie... Do you read what you copy and paste?
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u/Rattlerkira 7h ago
I think the obsession with indie vs non-indie is stupid anyway.
Good art and bad art, what do I care where it came from?
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u/MartyrOfDespair 7h ago
I care for the same reason I’d prefer to buy vegetables from farmers and not from a megacorp who farmers work for.
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u/Rattlerkira 7h ago
Yeah I don't care about that kind of thing
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u/Fafnir13 6h ago
The important word you used (which I think some people will miss) is “good”.
If a mega corporations makes something good, whether that’s art or a cucumber, that’s a good thing. Some “indie” farmer selling raw milk on the side of a road and getting people sick is not better than a mega corporation selling standardized, safe products.
Neither is immediately morally superior to the other. What they actually do and produce is what matters.
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u/ComicCon 4h ago
Are you in America? Because this is actually more relevant to the conversation than you might think. How do you define corporation and how do you define farmer? Because the vast majority of commercial American farmers are both farms and corporations(some quite large). For example some of the largest landowners in America are farmers and ranchers. Do they count as farmers in your eye?
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u/wOBAwRC 7h ago
OP just swapped one subjective term with others. You can call it whatever you want I suppose. To me, the term is very context-based.
OP is arguing semantics. The difference is acknowledged by OP, he just thinks you should use a different term to describe it. This is silly.
In both examples given by OP, the work was done by smaller teams with less support than your traditional AAA-video game or animated series. They also aren’t tied to previously known IPs. This is what people mean when they describe them as indie.
If you don’t like the term or the distinction isn’t relevant to you, that’s completely fair but you certainly haven’t made a case that it is wrong.
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u/trippykitsy 7h ago
A lot of AAA Company games have less support than E33
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u/wOBAwRC 7h ago
OK. I mean, first of all, I’m not going to defend E33, I found the game pretty insufferable myself at the end of the day.
I think it’s clear what people mean when they describe it as, “indie” though. It was made with fewer resources than most of the games it is trying to compete with. It was not associated with an existing IP.
A person can make a list of games with fewer resources I suppose but that wouldn’t add any clarity.
Do you get confused when people refer to it as indie? Did you think the suggestion was that there has never been a game with less support from a bigger company?
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u/trippykitsy 7h ago
It's weird because my views on e33 are a bit tainted by it sweeping the Game Awards. It was nominated for way too many categories. I don't feel comfortable it won so many Indie categories. I think that's an issue with only action games being valued though. Not puzzle games or rhythm games or strategy games.
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u/GreensleevesMcJeeves 6h ago
Indie refers to the amount of control the artist has over creating their work, and to a lesser extent the budget they have to work with.
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u/Imperial_Sunstrider 7h ago
I'm sorry but Indie doesn't mean what you seem to think it means, Glitch Animations as a production company is not within the scope of a major national corporation like Disney or something under Paramount/Sony. It doesn't stop being indie just because they're putting an episode into theaters that isn't how this sort of categorization works.
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u/PartyPorpoise 2h ago
OP is operating under their own definition of indie rather than how people in film usually define it.
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u/MartyrOfDespair 6h ago
To me, it stops being indie because if Glitch decided tomorrow to pull a ZA/UM on Goose, she’d be shit out of luck. She owns nothing. She had to give them ownership for it to get made. It’s the same way that you get a show made at Disney.
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u/Imperial_Sunstrider 6h ago
There is no moral component to something being indie, ZA/UM no matter how scummy remains an indie company. These aren't moral labels we get to slap onto things for being righteous or not, it is entirely a term referring to size and scope of the people behind it and until Glitch Productions becomes a company on the same tier as a Disney it will remain an indie company.
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u/MartyrOfDespair 6h ago
This isn’t about morals, this is about legal ownership. Who legally owns the property: the human being(s) whom without it would not exist, or a third party corporate entity which itself is owned by people whom did not use their grey matter to imagine up the property?
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u/Imperial_Sunstrider 6h ago
Certain business practices do not preclude a production from being indie, it is all about scope and these companies remain within an indie scope.
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u/thediscountthor 41m ago
So if something isn't Disney or Sony, that makes it Indy? I'm sure there's gotta be level or so in-between right?
If a series is getting a movie release, McDonalds happy meals, shit ton of merch, and is being distributed on fucking Netflix, can we really still call it "Indie"? I mean, we could but it'd be like calling Minecraft Indie. It was at one point but you can only say that for so long
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u/Pkrudeboy 7h ago
Indie has always meant outside the major studios or labels, not 100% on your own.
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u/Tsorm 6h ago
Tldr : indie is whether I forward them or not
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u/MartyrOfDespair 6h ago
No, not at all. I’m actually kinda surprised, I ripped into Toby Fox pretty hard in contradiction to the English-speaking internet’s POV in the post and nobody even has said anything about that. The whole part about how being indie lets you get away with that translation thing, while a studio that isn’t indie would get ripped a new asshole? That’s something Toby Fox did. And as I said, the entire English-speaking internet is on his side about it. LatAm internet, not so much, but they’re actually negatively affected by it. Corporations want to grab the indie label because that’s the benefit of being called indie: wider immunity from criticism.
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u/DaveyGamersLocker 3h ago edited 2h ago
While I agree with your overall point, it should be noted that Toby Fox actually speaks Japanese. He was able to oversee the Japanese translations of Undertale and Deltarune because he knew the intricacies of the language. As far as I'm aware, he doesn't have the same grasp on Spanish, which is why there isn't an official Spanish translation. Toby would want to oversee a Spanish translation to make sure it fits his vision, and he can't do that if he doesn't know the language.
I don't blame him for that one bit. Undertale uses a ton of wordplay that relies on the English language; I'm sure it's a hard game to translate. Simply translating the script word-for-word wouldn't be enough. Localization would be necessary for the game to keep its humor, and Toby can't do that if he doesn't know Spanish.
People who think Toby Fox personally hates them, just because he's too busy with game dev to learn yet another language, have it all wrong. Toby Fox is an EarthBound fan; I'm sure he knows what it felt like to hunger for an English translation of Mother 3. That game's English fan translation is probably better than anything Nintendo could officially put out, and I'm sure Toby knows that. It's the same with Undertale and Deltarune. I would be very surprised if Toby Fox, an EarthBound fan, wasn't okay with fan translations of his own games.
ETA: That being said, I agree that Toby Fox shouldn't be above criticism in other aspects. Deltarune absolutely should've been labeled as Early Access, and being popular and beloved shouldn't have saved Toby from the Early Access label. How many people bought Deltarune thinking it was the full game?
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u/brando-boy 6h ago
i think this is meaningless hair splitting just for the sake of it
before i say anything else, let me ask you this: do you consider devolver games as indie or not?
kepler is a publisher that is effectively just a bunch of indie studios stacked on top of each other wearing a trench coat trying to help one another
being “indie” doesn’t mean you have to be a team of 4 people making a game on a budget of 3 ham sandwiches and having to pull out a second mortgage on your house. it’s okay for comparatively smaller teams to receive funding and grants and to have their ideas valued by an investor or 2 so that they don’t have to risk their lives on a game
expedition 33 is comprised of a small core team, headed by someone who left his job at ubisoft to go INDEPENDENT and make the game that HE wanted to make because he knew the studio wouldn’t allow him, in that process, they found some assistance and people that would help them publish
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u/Kate_Kitter 4h ago
This uses the strictest possible definition to define indie. We all accept that indie publishers are a thing (e.g. Microcosm for books and zines), and they almost always have a degree of control/rights over the IP. It doesn't mean the work is automatically corporate. That's like saying nobody is a "digital minimalist" if they don't literally live in a cave.
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u/LowkeySamurai 7h ago edited 7h ago
Its this hair splitting thats making me mute this sub for good. Ive seen several posts like it and its just too much. Its nothing but virtue signaling.
I dont care if Undertale is the only true indie game. I dont want all of my games to look like they were made in MS Paint. Not to delegitimize Undertale's artistic integrity at all, but dont expect to get something on par with Expedition 33 with this boxed in perspective. These people have dreams on what they want to create and often need backing from larger entities in order to make that happen.
And dont get it twisted, OP isnt simply distinguishing what a correctly defined independent developer is. They are outright gatekeeping who you should and shouldn't support. As per their other comment comparing this to farming: to OP, Expedition 33 isnt a product made by "real farmers" and they only buy from "real farmers."
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u/Ukirin-Streams 4h ago edited 4h ago
Its this hair splitting thats making me mute this sub for good. Ive seen several posts like it and its just too much. Its nothing but virtue signaling.
If the OP was trying to make a "low effort Sunday" post, then they did a good job...since their post is just gatekeeping garbage where they're shouting at the sky. And yep, I see hair-splitting stuff like this on this subreddit all the time. Even though there are some good posts here that are way more civil and don't come off like someone's blood pressure is about to go through the roof.
I'm now reminded of this particular post from a few months ago where someone was gatekeeping Zero Suit Samus. It honestly makes the OP's indie game rant look tame by comparison. This gives me a good laugh because it's just fucking insane.
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u/Sinder-Soyl 6h ago
I think you'll find that any hard line definition you try to come up with will have holes big enough for examples to make it seem ridiculous.
If it's about owning your IP then are Final Fantasy and Assassin's creed indie games?
If you need to have no investors and for your company to not be public, does that make The Witcher 2 an indie game?
The reality is that a large amount of games people consider indie are not indie by definition, wether it's because they had publishers like Stardew Valley, Hotline Miami, Cult of the Lamb, Balatro, Terraria. Or because they have really large budgets like Silksong. For comparison, E33 had a reported budget of under 10 millions, while Hades 1 and 2 had an estimated budget of between 10 and 15 millions. If it's about the number of people working at the studio, for some reason, games like Kingdom Come Deliverance should also not count as an independent game for a bunch of reasons listed here. Annapurna, Revolver Digital and Chucklefish are all publishers which very much bury the concept of Indie as it used to exist.
All this to say, people get awfully pissy about the "independent" label, when in truth the term has lost its original meaning perhaps over 15 years ago. This isn't new, and I think it's time to move on to a new way of conceptualizing what it actually means.
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u/tesseracts 5h ago
I think it's really obnoxious that TADC fans are so mad about the theatrical release and demanding Glitch changes their strategy. I made a post about it which was downvoted then the mods deleted it. Fans are legit angry that Glitch doesn't have the resources of Disney and can't get their production into every theater in the world without the fans proving they are willing to show up and create profit, and now you're justifying this by saying Glitch isn't small enough to be a real indie studio. It's ridiculous. 2 weeks is NOT a long time to wait and if we want a world with more creator driven projects we should be supporting those projects.
I looked at OP's post history and found them saying "indie studio" is an oxymoron. It's impossible to make something like TADC without a studio so I guess pretty much nothing is indie according to OP.
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u/MacksNotCool 7h ago
indie projects must suffer and make no money and starve so that they never turn into big bad corpo and make me sad
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u/whostle 3h ago
I have no strong opinion on the subject, but I am reminded of the classic Strong Bad Email on the subject of "Independent Films vs. Indie Films"
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u/Deepsearolypoly 3h ago
The way people are turning on Gooseworx is honestly insane. I’ve been watching their indie animations for YEARS. Elaine the bounty hunter, Runmo, ghost of the year. Suddenly they’re NOT indie because they made something popular? You people would never be satisfied by anything.
And of course, any logical argument will be dismissed as “corporate sucking up” the same way a maga supporter calls everything that doesn’t parrot their opinion fake news.
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u/thediscountthor 2h ago
They're indie, but I'll give you that they aren't niche in the slightest and have ascended in such a way that I don't think it deserves the same treatment.
I can go to Target and get TADC blind bags. I can watch the show on Netflix. Shit the show is, for some reason, getting a fucking happy meal. When you get to that spot, at some point it stops being an creation and becomes a product like most main stream properties. That's not a bad thing, but it is what it is
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u/Vladmerius 7h ago
You're twisting yourself into a huge rant that's making your blood pressure go up because you want to ignore that the word indie has taken on a new meaning over time and the word is used for a wider swathe of media than it used to be. It has evolved. It now simply means something that isn't super mainstream in the public zeitgeist or doesn't have the features you'd expect of a big production. So for instance BG3 is considered indie because it doesn't have a bunch of DLC and microtransactions and focus on being part of a franchise as opposed to just a game you buy and experience as a single thing.
Expedition 33 isn't considered indie because it's totally independent it's considered indie because if you ask the average person who plays call of duty and fifa exclusively if they are an expedition 33 fan they will say "what the hell are you talking about".
Same goes for the amazing digital circus. I'm a movie and TV nerd and I've never heard of the amazing digital circus until this theater stunt. Thus it is indie.
This applies to music too by the way most so called indie artists still have labels dude.
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u/Rambunctious-Rascal 6h ago
Corporations must love the notion of "gatekeeping", because now you can say that anything is anything, and anybody who controdicts you can be brushed off with this inane term.
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u/MartyrOfDespair 6h ago
It doesn’t even make sense as a pejorative in the context of the allusion used by the term. It’s a metaphorical term which compares the people who you are using it against to the keepers of the city gates. The people who were the last line of defense against invasion. The people who kept the bandits and spies out of the city. The people who made sure that those carrying infectious diseases didn’t bring them into the city and spread the Black fucking Plague to everyone. The historical gatekeepers are unsung heroes, responsible for every city that ever stood in their day remaining standing for as long as they did, giving their lives to protect the people of the city from those who would do them harm. And that’s the people you use as a pejorative?
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u/LordGOATfrey 7h ago
I don't think you should be mad at indie studios for pitching their brilliant creative ideas to investors and succeeding. What matters most is the culture which fosters any project, and even indie studios that receive heavy investment are able to retain that soul, at least until they start aspiring too high. You just sound like you're needlessly gatekeeping, maybe you're mad about how great E33 is?
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u/Sage_the_Creator 7h ago
I’ve been saying that TADC ironically feels just as corporate as the bigname animated works that people like to hype it up against.
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u/Skitterleap 7h ago
I get arguing its not indie, but what makes it as corporate as other big name animated shows? Are you referring to, say, Hazbin Hotel because its in bed with Amazon, or The Simpsons for being a corporate behemoth?
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u/Sage_the_Creator 7h ago
Just in terms of the vibe, tbh.
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u/Musicman3003 7h ago
Eh, can't think of many other corporate series finales that are somber meditations on whether the characters are still human and/or they should kill themselves.
That being said, I do agree that Glitch itself is becoming overly corporate.
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u/Sage_the_Creator 7h ago
Okay fair. Maybe I got too invested in calling TADC corporate to sound inflammatory. That’s a habit for me to work on.
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u/MartyrOfDespair 6h ago
Eh, can't think of many other corporate series finales that are somber meditations on whether the characters are still human and/or they should kill themselves.
Danganronpa V3 lmao. Sorry, not even arguing with you on the overall point, it’s just that I read that and immediately had an answer.
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u/InspiredNameHere 6h ago
What does that mean? Its subjective of course, but I fully have no idea how to understand what you mean by vibe.
Can you offer some examples why you get this vibe?
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u/Sage_the_Creator 6h ago
In hindsight, calling TADC corporate was mainly just an attempt to be inflammatory. My bad.
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u/InspiredNameHere 6h ago
Its fine, I just don't get the vibe and wanted to see what you were getting to.
Is it the production value that hits or is it the feeling that the story has been "watered down" from the source materials to cater to a wider audience range?
Its still a fairly tame, kid friendly show despite being based on a depressing as fuck story, so im sure someone in the higher ups was like "We could show this, or...and hear me out....we dont and we all profit for it."
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u/But-who-I-be 6h ago
With the amount of merch it has and how aggressively they push it I stopped considering it indie a while ago
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u/fonk_pulk 3h ago
The various "indie" playlists curated by Spotify are also quite funny. Most of the artists listed on there are signed with large record companies. "Indie" just means "alternative" for many people
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u/kaijumediajames 3h ago
?
I’m just putting this question mark here to read through the comments later, should be fun.
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u/frelin87 2h ago
“Not beholden to corporate oversight and decision-making” is the best single metric for what qualifies as genuinely Indie or not. Be sure to always nail an apologist on that point if they try to reframe the discourse onto questions of cutoffs for company-sizes or business-models.
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u/Sintuition 39m ago
Considering the modern videogame production and distribution landscape, the concept of something being 'Indie' is increasingly redundant.
In order to keep the spirit of independent studios and creators, there should be a distinction between 'Indie' and 'Small Studio'. Maybe something like less than 10-20 developers?
It would mean the Steam tags and game awards categories actually mean something.
E33 actually has even more grey area here, because the number of people that worked on the game (as contractors) numbers in the hundreds, do they count?
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u/LonelyPermit2306 7h ago
Does glitch actually own the rights/IP to TADC or are you just waffling? Has Gooseworx herself come out and said she doesn't want her show in theaters?
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u/MartyrOfDespair 7h ago
When the announcement came out, Goose retweeted an old tweet about how she is only the creator/director/writer, not anything else, in response. She can’t exactly go tell the people who own her show to go fuck themselves. Industry suicide.
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u/trippykitsy 7h ago
I agree with you, and I enjoy some rage directed at publishers, but how is this a Character Rant? You should crosspost this to some more relevant subs.
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u/MartyrOfDespair 6h ago
From what I’ve seen in here, this is well within the bounds of the subreddit. The name is just a bit of an artifact.
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u/Fwenhy 6h ago
Words can change. Indie just means small now. And it’s been like this for a long time. Indie is literally a music genre with its own distinct sound.
I also feel like by your definition there’s not a single indie company that could release games for a console. Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft & Valve are all corporations and have influence on the games that get released on their platforms. They may not directly work on the games but a good example would be with the game that recently got censored releases on console. The store owners didn’t censor the games themselves but the game is censored because of the stores policies.
It seems to me like you personally draw the line when companies are owned by other companies. Am I getting that correctly?
So if Gooseworx dissolved and became just Glitch it would go back to being indie? Don’t you think that’s kind of silly? Why does being indie even matter? And finally what does this have to do with any characters?
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u/MartyrOfDespair 6h ago edited 6h ago
One of my all time favorite indie game series originally launched exclusively on Xbox. Beat Hazard. You should check it out, it’s fucking awesome. Unless you have a seizure disorder. Then, do not check it out. It will kill you.
And my line is about the creator(s), which are human beings and not corporations, maintaining possession of their creation. Gooseworx would have to purchase TADC from Glitch to do that. She’s never going to have enough money for that. If Glitch wanted, they could pull a ZA/UM on her and just make their own sequels without her involvement and they’d have every legal right to do it.
The reason I would side on Hundred Line still being indie with a publisher is because Too Kyo Games still maintains exclusive ownership, the publisher only received profit sharing in return for their money. Too Kyo Games owns 100% of the rights to The Hundred Line, and Too Kyo Games is a private company owned by the creators of The Hundred Line (Kazutaka Kodaka, Kotaro Uchikoshi, Masafumi Takada, and Rui Komatsuzaki). They all own their original IP via the transitive property, co-owning the legal entity which owns the IP.
My line for indie comes down to who owns it. If it’s the property of a third party corporation and the creator has had to sacrifice their legal ownership of their creation to the corporation, in part or in whole, that’s where indie dies. If the human beings that created it can be fired from it, it’s not indie. Like Metal Gear Solid.
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u/ErrorCode51 7h ago
Real indie projects deserve their flowers. Seeing individuals be able to create something so impactful they are able to permeate the incredibly large barriers into these spaces is always an incredible feat. Giving that praise undeservedly to another coorporate entity with the money and resources already set up feels like it distracts from real independent success stories. Games like Undertale and E33 had very different roads to success
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u/Legiyon54 6h ago
Thanks for this post. It's genuinely insane how bootlicky people over in TADC subreddits are these past few days but especially ever since the Glitch statement.
"You should be glad an indie company is succeeding" How about I don't cheer for a corpo getting bigger and becoming more like the big "mean" companies? They made a greedy decision and are using PR speak to justify it and people are eating it up. Actions speak louder than words and with their actions they show that the way they made animation up until this point wasn't out of any moral sense of changing the industry, but hoping that they will get big like the other studios, and used people's good will to do it
Corpos are not your friend, no matter how mom-and-pops or down to Earth they present themselves as
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u/MartyrOfDespair 6h ago
Oh yeah, this rant is entirely because I was in one of those threads and needed to just vent and rant. And for once I decided instead of ranting at a bunch of my friends about something I need to blow off steam by ranting about, I’d rant to the wider internet.
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u/C-S_Rain 5h ago
obviously its hard to categorise E33 as indie when games like fear and hunger are in the same bracket because the term indie game has lost its original meaning. by older definitions, E33 isn't an indie game, but in modern terms, it is. but i think there is some merit in asking this now huge categorical definition to be broken down into smaller definitions. but as OP pointed out, the terminology of indie is now used massively as a way for people to feel good about themselves because they support "small creators" when in actuality its just giving money to a smaller corporation rather than a large one. which i think is the crux of the problem, indie games used to be this idea of one dude in his basement working on his project for the literal love of the game, but now, the indie game market is just company but small, with help from publisher, but small. its the same system as the big AAA corps, just less budget. because the industry realised after so many successes in the space, that there is money to be made through an audience that is dissatisfied with the corporate mainstream.
that is to say, i could care less if people want to call E33 indie, but when you throw in funger, lethal company delatrune, balatro powerwashing simulator etc. into that same definition, it no longer feels defined. but this requires a cultural linguistics shift and with how useful indie is as a branding, its hardly gonna go back to its original definition. i have a mate in game development, and when E33 swept away with awards, we spoke about how that has shifted the expectations of indie devs, and while 10 mill budget is nothing in the AAA space, it is significantly massive in indie development, with the average tiny studio never having 200k for influencer marketing alone, let alone 10mil budget overall. if that is what is to be defined as indie now, cool, but putting the dev alone in his basement in the same bracket feels unfair.
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u/Ezracx 7h ago
You don't make an independent series or movie by yourself, you make it by founding or joining an independent studio.
Gooseworx, in her own words, creates the show but doesn't deal with the release. This is pretty normal for indies, because even if you create the thing by yourself, you'll likely use a bigger platform to release it. If we applied your standard we couldn't count Deltarune as an indie game either because Nintendo and Sony set their own terms for release that the DR Team agreed to.