Sorry Kevin, there's already several dark money pits pushing high-budget games masquerading as indie as a gambit to avoid criticism. Too late buddy!
The topic of games with the indie label intrigues me.
Unless I'm missing something, I'm fairly certain most people didn't really care what games were "indie" or not before 2025.
It was brought up, sure, but it never became a "Problem". You have Little Nightmares being considered "indie" even though it was published by Bandai Namco. You have several indie game publishing companies helping out with some games. The earliest indie games, Limbo and Braid had to adhere to Microsoft's guidelines to be published on the Xbox live arcade.
And then, Expedition 33 won Game of the Year in 2025. Indie games winning awards wasn't anything new, but this was the first time a game won the main award at the main award show. The reason why "Is this Indie or not?" only became a problem now, because people were putting E33 on a pedestal as a representative of indie games.
People didn't actually care whether or not E33 was an indie game, they were wondering if a game made by experienced former big company members, with higher than average budget going into it, where the game itself was a photorealistic 3D game barely any different than the AAA stuff, deserved to represent indie games.
Glitch, for the past several years, has been the embodiment of this problem. It wasn't an award that got them here though, it was their own insistence that "WE'RE representing indie animation. WE'RE making the industry better. WE'RE helping people".
The problem isn't whether or not Glitch is an indie company, it's whether or not a company with financial backing from the local government, with enough connections to have one of their projects be shown in theaters worldwide, and is now trying to become a game company, deserves to "represent" other indies
) this won't be as embarrassing as last time when teens tried sending 'zas and spam Cooper's address in live chat, to which some Randel snitched to Glitch staff about the oncoming soy /raid/.
