Summary
“Indie” is one of the most-used and least-defined labels in games. The strict definition — a game made without the financial or technical backing of a major publisher — is so broad that it would classify EA, Valve, and Epic as independent, since no larger corporation owns them. Because self-publishing is now cheap (around 10-million productions with ex-AAA staff. A more useful approach treats “indie” as a position on a spectrum, judged from a few observable factors rather than a single yes/no test (samyam, actually, these aren’t indie games, see source-what-is-an-indie-game).
This page presents one practitioner rubric for that judgement. It is a discussion and teaching tool, not an industry standard, and its author is explicit that it encodes personal opinion.
Key ideas
- Literal vs practical definition. The literal “no major-publisher backing” test fails because it admits obviously non-indie companies and because publishing has become so accessible. Practical definitions instead ask how a game was made and resourced.
- Four factors. The rubric scores a game on creative control, team size, funding source, and budget, then sums the scores into a tier.
- Indie as a spectrum. The gap between one person with nothing and a studio with $10 million is far larger than the gap between AA and AAA, which is why a single “indie” bucket is too coarse and the rubric adds an Indie+ band.
- Deliberate exclusions. “Vibes” and development time are left out: they are not reliably measurable, and a polished or long-developed game (e.g. Manor Lords, Hollow Knight) can still be deeply indie, while a “scrappy-feeling” game can be well funded.
The indie score
| Factor | Options and points |
|---|---|
| Creative control | full studio control +2 · shared with publisher 0 · publisher-driven −2 |
| Team size | ≤5 +3 · 6–15 +2 · 16–30 +1 · 31–50 0 · 51–100 −1 · 100+ −2 |
| Funding source | major publisher / VC −2 · indie publisher 0 · self-funded from a prior success +1 · crowdfunded +2 · self-funded from savings or a day job +3 |
| Budget | <50k–200k +2 · 500k–1M 0 · >$1M −2 |
Tiers (sum of the four): ≥6 Indie · 3–5 Indie+ · 2 to −1 AA · < −1 AAA.
In practice
For students positioning their own projects, the rubric is a quick reality check on claims and comparators:
- A typical student or hobby project — full creative control, a tiny team, self- or unfunded, a near-zero budget — scores very high and is unambiguously indie. This is useful when writing a pitch or store page: lean into the underdog framing honestly (see publishing-and-funding and game-marketing-fundamentals).
- When choosing comparable titles for a pitch or P&L (see game-industry-realities), the rubric stops you citing a 10m budget) scores around AA, not indie, despite its marketing.
- The single strongest signal is usually funding source: a major-publisher or VC deal pulls a game out of the indie band faster than any other factor, because it tends to bring shared creative control with it.
Treat the exact numbers loosely. They were reverse-engineered from examples, so borderline cases (Indie+ vs AA) can flip with small changes to the thresholds.
Evidence
- The rubric and tiers are taken directly from the source (samyam, actually, these aren’t indie games, see source-what-is-an-indie-game).
- Worked classifications given in the source illustrate the bands: Stardew Valley
+11and Hollow Knight10(clearly Indie); Silksong4(Indie+ — small team and full control, but a ~$9m self-funded budget); Hades 2, Cuphead (−1), Baldur’s Gate 3 (−1), and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (0) all land in AA; GTA 6 (−8) and Fortnite (−4) are firmly AAA. - The source notes that Clair Obscur won — then had revoked — indie awards at The Game Awards 2025, a concrete example of the label being contested in practice.
Implications
- For analysis and teaching, “is it indie?” is more honestly framed as “how indie, on which axes?“. The four factors give a shared vocabulary for that conversation.
- Calling a well-funded studio game “indie” is not harmless: it lets large productions compete for attention and awards meant to protect genuinely under-resourced developers.
- The factors map onto real production decisions students will face — how big a team to form, whether to seek a publisher or crowdfund, and what budget to plan — so the rubric doubles as a lens on the publishing-and-funding choices ahead of them.
Open questions
- The weightings are not empirically grounded. Would a data-driven study of funding, team size, and outcomes produce different thresholds?
- Should asset provenance (hand-made vs AI-generated vs licensed) be a fifth factor? The Clair Obscur AI-texture controversy suggests audiences already treat it as relevant to “indie” credibility.
- Does an “Indie+” band actually help, or does it just move the same definitional argument to a new boundary?
Related
game-industry-realities · publishing-and-funding · game-marketing-fundamentals · business-model-canvas-for-games · source-what-is-an-indie-game