What is the definition of an indie studio? Is Larian an indie?

[BANANA CONDUCT]

it don't need no man

 

[Fedora Master]

Indie Studio: Do the devs regularly drink soy and/or soylent? If yes: Indie.

 

[Lutte]

Whatever is the way you want to describe Larian studios, they are not AA level studio and shouldn’t be compared with them, both in terms of payroll and size. Calling them, or these other medium studios as indie, makes the term completely meaningless.

Not even dictionary definitions can defeat autists. Autists have their own vocabulary, which they define like math rules, and are born without the ability to understand the common shared usage and less literal secondary meanings that often entirely take over primary in real world speech. When faced with what they perceive as 'wrong usage' they throw temper tantrums and lose it. Even when dictionaries are updated with real world usage accepted definitions, the autist will stick to the only thing he knows, like an antediluvian who can't speak anything other than a dead language. Imagine a vampire who has lived through the victorian era and is afflicted with autism. Everything about modern English would be wrong to him. He'd create threads on the codex talking about how people are wrong and are using words the wrong way.

 

[Bad Sector]

I'm at work break so i can't go to much detail at the moment. But i am into the whole indie scene since the early 2000s when places like dexterity software's forums and later indiegamer forums were where devs gathered, before things blew up in the late 2000s and as far as i remember, indie meant independent from a publisher (or other funding scheme that would influence a game). It was also mainly applied to games, not directly to developers - indie developers were those who could live off their indie games.

The idea that indie=small was a misunderstanding that mainstream gaming journalists had (and made sort of popular due to their position of influence towards people who didn't knew better) since all the games they saw calling themselves "indie" were made by smaller teams (another falsehood they perpetuated was that indie=innovative, but again that was because since all the indie games they saw were those that managed to reach them through word of mouth due to their innovations, since they didn't had the budget that big publisher backed games had - in reality indie games were largely derivative going back to 2000s but since they had no interesting mechanics nor budget to shove themselves in your - and mainstream journalists' - face, you didn't knew they existed).

The problem with the idea that indie=small is that it is a vague definition, based on feelings instead of hard data that is mainly used to include or exclude games and/or developers based on how whoever uses the vague definition feels at the time - this itself means that you cannot really use it for any meaningful discussion as everyone involved has a different understanding what it means.

Of course you can say that language evolves and definitions change, which in general i'd agree, but TBH personally in this case i do not really like the idea of perpetuating a misunderstanding mainstream gaming journalists had due to their ignorance nor the idea of introducing vague definitions for something that already has a perfectly fine hard data based one.

 

[Turuko]

it's a definition that changes in the context you use it
es Bungie, after the divorce with Activision, is an indipendent private company but nobody would call them "indie"
it's mostly used to define a certain look, certain scope, certain production values etc etc

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

Not even dictionary definitions can defeat autists. Autists have their own vocabulary, which they define like math rules, and are born without the ability to understand the common shared usage and less literal secondary meanings that often entirely take over primary in real world speech. When faced with what they perceive as 'wrong usage' they throw temper tantrums and lose it.