samyam — "actually, these aren't indie games" (the indie score)

Source metadata

Type: YouTube video essay (transcript ingested).
Author: samyam (independent Unity developer and educator).
Title: “actually, these aren’t indie games”, published 2026-06-12.
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leUiJgFdSok
Register: opinionated, comedic practitioner piece. Explicitly framed by the author as “all personal opinion”. Treat the rubric as a useful discussion tool, not an industry standard.

The literal definition of indie — a game made without the financial and technical backing of a major corporate publisher — is too broad to be useful, because by it EA, Valve, and Epic would all count as “indie” (nobody owns them). The label has drifted as self-publishing has become cheap (≈ $100 to put a game on Steam).
The video proposes an “indie score”: a checklist-style rubric across four factors, summed to place a game in a tier.
The four factors and their 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 previous success +1; crowdfunded +2; self-funded from savings or a day job +3.
- Budget — < $50 k ‘ + 3‘;$ 50k–200k +2; $200 k -500 k ‘ + 1‘;$ 500k–1M 0; >$1M −2.
Tiers: ≥6 Indie · 3–5 Indie+ · 2 to −1 AA · < −1 AAA.
It deliberately excludes “vibes” and development time, arguing those are not measurable and produce inconsistent judgements.
The closing argument is that the label exists to protect underdogs, and that “indie energy” (personal, unusual, risk-taking work) matters more than the badge.

On the literal definition: “by this definition, EA, Valve, and Epic are also all indie studios because nobody owns them. It’s like calling a billionaire self-made because they don’t have a boss.”
On AA vs indie: AA games “typically [have] moderate budgets of around two to twenty million … and bigger team sizes of over 50 people” (examples given: Life is Strange, Helldivers 2, A Plague Tale: Innocence).
Worked classifications from the video: Stardew Valley +11 (Indie), Hollow Knight 10 (Indie), Silksong 4 (Indie+), Hades 2 (AA), Cuphead −1 (AA), Baldur’s Gate 3 −1 (AA), Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 0 (AA), GTA 6 −8 (AAA), Fortnite −4 (AAA).
On the awards controversy: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 won best indie game at The Game Awards 2025, which the publisher’s own CEO called “blurring the line”; the video notes its indie/debut awards were later revoked after AI-generated textures were found.

This source informs the production and industry-context material rather than any technical page. It is most useful as:

the basis for defining-indie-games, which turns the rubric into a teaching reference;
supporting context for game-industry-realities (the indie/AA/AAA career and economics picture) and publishing-and-funding (funding source as the strongest single indie signal in the rubric).

The point values are reverse-engineered from examples and are not empirically derived; different weightings would reclassify borderline games. How sensitive are the tiers to the author’s chosen thresholds?
The rubric treats “creative control” as binary-ish (full / shared / publisher-led), but real publishing deals sit on a spectrum. Does a single ordinal score capture this?
The AI-texture controversy around Clair Obscur raises a separate question the rubric does not address: should provenance of assets (hand-made vs AI-generated vs licensed) factor into how “indie” a game is considered?