What Even Is an Indie Game?

This year’s Game Awards marked a historic moment: three of the six Game of the Year nominees were indies, something that The Game Awards’ has been loud and proud about. Indie games have long been at the forefront of creativity and innovation in gaming, collectively standing in stark contrast to the oft-derivative, overly safe AAA space. Some of the best games of 2025 have been from the indie camp, and have been praised for their ingenuity, integrity, or other signifiers of quality: Expedition 33 is better-written than Call of Duty, Hades 2 has better combat than Assassin’s Creed Shadows, et cetera.

But watching The Game Awards got me thinking, just like many others: what is an indie game anyway? If we were to look at the literal definition, which is an abbreviation of independent, it’s hard to apply it to most games commonly accepted as indie: wouldn’t a game need to be entirely self-published and self-funded to truly be called independent? Take Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, for instance. Sandfall’s debut, which actually won Best Independent Game as well as GOTY, is published by Kepler Interactive, a large entity that’s partially owned by NetEase, the last company most gamers would associate with the “indie” moniker. But there’s still a clear rift between the likes of Expedition 33 and blockbuster franchises like Call of Duty and God of War. The question is what that differentiating factor actually is.

Defining Indie Gaming: Money Matters

The nebulous definition of indie games includes a commonly accepted premise: indie games are generally less expensive to make than AAA games. If we assume a handful of games to be indie, and another handful to be AAA, then the data supports this notion.

This is a bit of a wide spread, but even the most expensive of the above is dwarfed by recent AAA games.

This is far from the bottom line of the indie discussion, though. The most obvious difference between these two sets of games, part and parcel of the budgetary question, is their individual scopes. Something like Hollow Knight is obviously much less expensive to produce than Marvel’s Spider-Man 2: the former is a side-scrolling metroidvania with minimal voice acting, developed by three people, while the latter is a hundreds-person endeavor, with cutting-edge graphics, 3D physics systems, motion-captured cutscenes, and the like. This is irrespective of these games’ replay value or subjective “quality,” of course.

Indie Games Are Small, AAA Games Are Big, Right?

Trends would suggest that AAA games are always broader in scope, budget, and ambition than indie games, but this shouldn’t be taken as a rule. For instance, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown is a side-scrolling metroidvania with the “feel” of an indie, and it would be hard to argue that its visuals and production value are above the self-published Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, which dons more of the trappings of the AAA scene than The Lost Crown. But you’d be hard-pressed to find someone calling The Lost Crown an indie, as it’s developed and published by Ubisoft, one of the largest forces in the industry.

The “Indie” Look and Dave the Diver

One can’t discuss the definition of indies in 2025 without mentioning a certain Dave the Diver fiasco. The pixel-art game, which revolves around diving for resources to serve at a beachside sushi restaurant, was nominated for the Best Independent Game at The Golden Joystick Awards and The Game Awards in 2023. For many, this felt warranted: Dave the Diver earned stellar reviews and semi-viral success, and a cursory glance at it among fellow nominees like Sea of Stars might spark assumptions of it being another inspiring indie hit that broke through the AAA noise.

But calling it independent is a bit disingenuous. Dave the Diver developer Mintrocket is a subsidiary of Nexon, a massive South Korean corporation known for, among other things, Maple Story and The First Descendent. Nexon didn’t just help fund Mintrocket—Nexon wholly owned the studio during Dave the Diver‘s development. Mintrocket even responded to its 2023 nominations by saying, “there’s nothing indie about us, we didn’t apply for [the nominations].”

Why, then, was Dave the Diver considered for Best Independent Game at the two biggest game award events in the world? One might imagine that it’s due to its quasi-retro pixel aesthetic, or perhaps its limited scope relative to other AAA games. Neither of these factors has anything to do with the game being independent, though. Geoff Keighley actually commented on Dave the Diver‘s inclusion in the indie category ahead of The Game Awards 2023, saying:

“Does independent mean the budget of the game? Does independent mean where the source of financing was? Is it based on the team size? Is it the kind of independent spirit of a game, meaning kind of a smaller game that’s different?”

It’s a bit noncommittal, but it would appear that Keighley’s main point is that there’s no single factor that determines whether a game can be called “indie” or not. I might not agree with Dave the Diver‘s Best Independent Game nomination, but I can’t argue with Keighley there.

Indie and AAA Is No Longer a Dichotomy

It’s clear that the “indie games” have transcended their literal definition: games developed and published independently. Many AAA games are developed and published by the same company, and if a studio is completely owned by a major entity, like how Mintrocket is owned by Nexon, isn’t that more or less the same thing? Of course, this clashes with the dichotomy that many gamers, myself included, hold in our heads. The dichotomy between the besuited, conservative, left-brain publishers and the artistic, innovative developers.

It makes sense that we would think this way—we all know that some game design choices are made for the sake of profit rather than creativity or ingenuity. But this struggle between the “business” side of gaming and the “art” side is far more complex than just big, greedy corporations straitjacketing integrity-driven artists. It’s more about the struggle between commerce and creativity, which can happen at any scale. Even if a developer isn’t being literally told to make their game a certain way by a higher-up, they may still react to economic pressures, for better or worse.

While indie games like Hollow Knight Silksong and Hades 2 can be funded, in part or entirely, by the revenue from prior titles, this isn’t the case for most up-and-coming studios. Even if an outfit has already published a profitable game, it’s likely that it would have to seek outside investment for an upcoming project. Video games are expensive to produce, and while they are being made, they don’t make money.

Maybe these studios will team up with indie publishers (an interesting oxymoron) like Devolver Digital, but how, then, are they different from a AAA developer like FromSoftware, which operates independently of its various publishers? What if a studio offers a portion of its eventual revenue to investors or loaners? What if an investment company gives a studio funding in exchange for equity?

To be clear, none of the answers to these questions should necessarily disqualify a game from being considered indie, or AAA for that matter. But that’s the point: there’s no litmus test for this sort of thing. All the above questions, including Keighley’s, need to be asked when defining something as AAA, AA, or indie, even if some of the answers contradict first impressions or assumptions.

“Indie,” like all categories and definitions, is only as good as its usefulness. In many cases, the whole point of calling something an indie game is to highlight grassroots origins, smaller teams, and more modest budgets. It’s good to say “indie” when setting expectations about a game, for instance, or when trying to give kudos to studios that did a lot with a little. But slapping an indie label on a game isn’t a necessary precursor to such discussions or conclusions—the labels are more or less shorthand for such elements. Maybe we should try to take more time to spell things out.