Oh those guys? Yeah those are just the dozens of professional voice actors we could afford to hire with our tiny baby game studio budget! And those guys? Yeah that’s just our 7-person “engineering” team. What do you mean your entire studio is 4 people?
suck off me
(for the record I’m not dunking on Hades or Hades 2 as a game this is just something that pisses me (and I assume only me) off)
I feel like it’s a fair moniker for any studio that doesn’t have a board of directors and keeps any stock private and within the company. It’s a way different model from Activision/Blizzard/Ubisoft etc.
Sort of? Like, your argument makes sense, it totally does. I just don’t feel it, if that makes any sense. I know working off emotions is not a good decision when it comes to things like these, but I just can’t find myself looking at these companies and giving them that moniker.
Like, from my perspective, Supergiant Games has a lot more in common with Activision/Blizzard/Ubisoft than, well, if you want an example, @Comrade_Mushroom@hexbear.net’s game is a much better fit in my opinion. I just can’t get it through my head that comrade has anything in common with Supergiant Games. If comrade was placed into a room with the CEO/whatever of Supergiant Games, would they have more in common than if the CEO/whatver of Supergiant Games was placed into a room with the CEO of Blizzard Entertainment?
I think we gotta either get a different term for medium sized indie studios, or for the very small ones.
Independent Studio and Independent Developer are two different things. The latter would be a small company that has employees, while the latter is just a person and some friends making a game.
So yeah, I think using “Studio” instead of “Developer” makes sense
You’re right but what about Nolla games? It’s like, 4 devs, a sound designer, and a band they asked to make the music, but it’s a studio. They made the best roguelike of all time. Feels wrong to put them in the same category as Supergiant that’s almost 10 times as large in dev headcount alone.
idealizing the solo developer like this is probably some kind of cultural brainworm most of us have even if we’re on the side of supergiant counting as indie because there’s not even 50 full-time employees and they aren’t a publisher for other people.
does that make valve an indie studio?
Valve isn’t indie, but there is a bit of truth to it. Staying private and not being obligated to tear apart your company chasing AI or whatever has made Valve significantly less ass than the publicly traded studios. That air of not being super corporate is what some people think of when they say indie, I think.