The Game Awards nominees are in, and six contenders will vie for Game of the Year: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, Donkey Kong Bananza, Hades 2, Hollow Knight: Silksong, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. This lineup is notable: for the first time since the show began, multiple independent-style projects are seriously competing for the top honor.
That development has sparked debate. Take Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which leads the field with a record twelve nominations and appears in both Best Independent Game and Debut Indie Game categories as well as Game of the Year. Those dual indie nods have prompted observers to ask whether the title truly belongs in the “indie” bracket.
Visually and in terms of production value, Expedition 33 reads more like a polished AA or even AAA release than a shoestring indie. Sandfall Interactive’s core team numbers roughly thirty people, and reporting indicates the development budget was smaller than you might expect for a game at this level — a combination that places it in a gray area between small-team indies (for example, the three-person Team Cherry behind Silksong) and big-budget tentpoles.
Part of the confusion stems from how Sandfall published the game. The studio is independent, but it partnered with Kepler Interactive for publishing support — a relationship that helped secure a cast including Charlie Cox and Andy Serkis and landed the game in a major publisher showcase. Many independent studios pursue publishing partnerships to reach broader audiences; partnership alone doesn’t always map cleanly to “not indie.”
Indeed, publishers like Raw Fury have built their business around supporting independent teams, and even clearly indie projects sometimes work with third-party publishers — for example, Playstack backed Balatro, a small-team title that was widely discussed in awards circles the previous year. These arrangements blur simple definitions based solely on distribution or funding.
There’s a precedent for this ambiguity: Baldur’s Gate 3 captured the industry’s attention in 2023 and was widely seen as an independent triumph, yet it wasn’t treated as an indie in every awards category despite being self-published by Larian. Similarly contentious was 2023’s Best Independent Game nomination for Dave the Diver, which — despite its retro look and low price — was produced by Mintrocket, a studio tied to the larger publisher Nexon.
Most of the other nominees in the Best Independent Game list — Absolum, Ball x Pit, Blue Prince, Hades 2, and Hollow Knight: Silksong — squarely fit the traditional indie profile. The Debut Indie Game lineup likewise includes clearly independent efforts such as Despelote, Dispatch, and Megabonk, alongside Blue Prince and Expedition 33.
Dispatch illustrates the middle ground well. Its aesthetic and pricing look indie, but its voice cast (Aaron Paul, Jeffrey Wright) and funding support from Critical Role complicate the picture. AdHoc, the studio behind Dispatch, numbered roughly thirty staff when the game was shown publicly — similar in scale to Sandfall — which raises the same classification questions.
Expect this debate to persist. Some awards bodies may treat Expedition 33 as an indie title; others will draw stricter lines. Sandfall’s director has even described the studio in unconventional terms, adding fresh nuance to the discussion. Ultimately, the industry lacks a single, universally accepted vocabulary for distinguishing small-scale independents from larger, independent-minded projects — and until it does, we’ll keep circling back to the same question: what makes a game “indie”?
In the end, perhaps the label is subjective — a quality you recognize on sight rather than a rule you can neatly apply.
Source: Polygon
