I see that Vedinad, the creator of Megabonk, has requested that the nomination for Debut Indie Game be withdrawn, on the grounds that it's not his first game.
Will Sandfall follow suit? I'm not holding my breath.
The Game Awards just shouldn't have put Exp 33 in that category. I would argue they shouldn't have put Exp 33 in the indies category either - a game with a 10+ million dollar budget made by people with experience and contacts within AA and AAA studios, a 30 person core team and over 400 total people involved in the production(with other studios making some of the most major parts of the game) is not a sensible definition of 'indie'. Maybe Game Awards needs an intermediate-budget category so they can let the AA games and equivalents compete with each other. Although games would then have to admit what their budget was.
Yeh there needs to be some kind of quantitative framings around what should/could technically constitute an 'indie' studio. With how fluid the current defining criteria is, Larian could well have been put in this category for BG3 (!)
I think there’s an argument for even silk song not being indie with how popular the first game was and team cherrys ties to xBox but maybe I’m just being to extreme
@FawfulsFury Team Cherry have a huge financial cushion from the success of Hollow Knight but, other than that, I think that they've stuck pretty well to their indie roots. The bulk of the work on Silksong was done by just four people - including a composer who also worked on other projects - so it's not like they've blown a huge amount on external contractors or marketing. Aspiring indie devs can, and will, learn a lot from how they operate.
Supergiant are perhaps a bit more questionable. They've grown considerably from the studio that made Bastion and Transistor and even the first Hades had a production cost that was north of $10 million, although that might just be because they pay well and don't crunch. They still seem a lot more connected to the indie ethos than Sandfall, at any rate.
The Game Awards thought Sifu was a fighting game, no one should be shocked they have a flawed concept of the endlessly contentious term "indie".
In general expecting The Game Awards to be 100% serious and legitimate is ultimately a fool's errand. My bar has been set at "consistently watchable" for them and it has passed that bar like 3 times out of 11.
I want to see all the other games that Sega is working on that they promised in their trailer last year. More Virtua Fighter would be nice too. Maybe a new console.
Looking at the nominees this year, I'm pretty uninterested in seeing so many categories full of the same games.
I'll just take the Not-E3 trailers and announcements in the day after this year I think.
@Grumblevolcano given they just released a new console, I would love for them to announce a new game, like they did when the Switch 1 released, they announced Bayo3 as well as a port of Bayonetta 1 and 2
Dispatch is a choose-your-own-adventure game. It's been a viral hit that you can see clips of all over social media for the past couple of months.
I don't really think of it as an indie game though, as it was made by a team led by ex-Telltale veterans and they hired the, now long established, Igloo Studio to do the animation production. I'd be surprised if it cost much less to make than Clair Obscur did, but if that's a debut indie game too...
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Topic: The Game Awards 2025
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