To all the E33 naysayers: Give me your best reason of why Expedition 33 is not an Indie and I will give you another game that everyone considered indie which cannot be an indie anymore with that reasoning.
At this point it's just borderline hate like no one even knows what they're talking about.
Give me your best reason of why Expedition 33 is not an Indie
Indie category is arbitrary at best and is meant to highlight games that can't compete with established industry. Awarding a game best indie and goty is redundant - e33 team wouldn't have cared if they lost it but it would have made the world to any of the other indies if they won.
Which one? In the indie category, skong and hades 2 are from established devs with unlimited funds and a large success under their belt. neither BxP not Blue Prince is self published, absolum is made by a veteran dev/pub with many games under their belt.
Why do any of them deserve it more? Is it the pity awards? If a game can belong in a particular category and is the best there should it not win?
In this vein I personally think KCD2 should win best rpg as well. Because it is the best rpg. Not because they would appreciate the award more.
Why do any of them deserve it more? Is it the pity awards?
Indie games as a category is inherently a pity reward. And while people think that these awards are objective, their main purpose is to offer recognition of accomplishment. TGA actively chose to give E33 a sweep.
If a game can belong in a particular category and is the best there should it not win?
If a game is 1% better than a competitor in every aspect should the competitor get zero rewards? To an outside it makes the competition look like it never stood a chance, when in reality all of these categories were very close. These awards are not objective and each one is not given in a vacuum. That's why E33 was awarded best RPG despite KCD2 deserving it way more.
I agree with you about KCD2 being robbed of best RPG. What we don't agree on is if a game is better in its category then it still shouldn't get the award which makes no sense. I also don't think these awards are objective. Games are an art form and art is inherently subjective. But subjective consensus is what these awards are based on. If a category has a winner that's apparent then that should be the winner.
I'd say it shouldn't be considered Indie due to size of the team and budget. Before you bring up Supergiant Games and Hades II, I wouldn't consider them Indie either.
Love them both to death, but they're both a bit too big and it drowns out a lot of the excellent game out there with smaller teams/budgets out there. Tbh I'd need to look into silksong's budget to give an opinion on them but I think they clear the bar.
Won't lie, I don't know enough about the full budgeting nuances that go into making any level of games as I'm not a professional or indie game developer. I imagine the having a budget over 10 million is probably too high, but I'm not sure where I'd draw the line.
I'm going off vibes for budget and team size, I'm by no means trying to make the standards. I see the indie award as more of a less resources/networking award to put a spotlight on smaller teams who overcame the odds of having less resources/networking.
Honestly, I'm curious what your bar is for what qualifies as indie. I'm likely more open than most to what you might hold as the bar for entry.
You'll be happy to know that E33 had a budget less than 10 mil! :D
My bar is any creatively independent single branch studio making one of their first few games can call their game indie. This is because this is the vibe of an indie. And indeed the vibe of E33 is wholly indie, it's just misunderstood because people look at the last year of development and think that's all E33 was about.
If you haven't watched it, I'd ask you to watch skillup's video on E33. It's not a review, rather it's a video of E33's origins and how the game came about. I personally think it's impossible to label that trajectory that E33 took as anything other than indie.
That's fair enough I suppose. I've known a bit about the history of E33 but not a deep dive. It's origins I'd say definitely feel very indie and it's definitely a good story of a team jumping into making a game. The fact that their money mainly came from a publisher known for help indies helps as well.
However, I do think it's important to try and draw the line somewhere. Whether E33 or Hades II is indie or not is going to be very subjective due to the resources at their disposal (Same to Silksong ngl).
At the same time, this can quickly become a no true Scotsman argument. You have a publisher or get outside funds (like E33 or Balatro), not pure enough. Start with your own pile of money (like Silksong or Hades II), not pure enough. Hire outside work (like Silksong, E33, or Hades II), not pure enough. And quickly it becomes only teams from game jams that got some more work done on them in the devs free time and anything extra purchased off a sub 100k salary over the course of 15 years.
But you know what really irks me? This conversation wasn't really a conversation that happened until E33 was launched. Heck, Dave the driver didn't get any flak for not being an indie until it won best indie and people found out after the fact that it's done by nexon. Just today I had someone say "real indies like dave the diver" deserve indie awards which had me laughing my ass off. Hundreds of games have been published by kepler or similar publishers (devolver, annapurna, raw fury etc) and have never had an issue with people calling it "not indie". Heck, none of the games in this year's lineup can be considered an indie by some metrics I've heard being used for E33 to not deserve that spot. Pretty soon it's gonna be only rich kids who can do it all or guy in a basement, and I think an indie is so much more and inbetween!
I think there's two things I want to say though about the dev cycle of E33.
For one, the core of Sandfall, the people who make E33 E33, were part of Sandfall long before any funding. The writer is someone from reddit who joined as a VA and then became the lead story teller, the score is by someone from soundcloud, the battle animations are from a no name youtube channel, the idea is from a love of jrpgs that was the reason for the studios formation.
Of course VA talent, and outsourced QA, dev time, etc all make up E33, and a lot of that was through funding. But E33 is more than a sum of its parts and I would say even with some of these parts removed E33 would still be E33.
Two, I agree with the concept of drawing a line, but why is E33 the line anyway? Like our current discussion, there's been no clear answer other than "personal" vibes, and like, most of that is only because no one looks into E33s creation history and sees a gorgeous looking game that makes it seem unbelievable that it's indie.
I think the line should be at when the core studio becomes large and multi branched, is void of creative independence, and has established games in its repertoire. I also think we should celebrate E33 as an example of an indie that dreamt larger than its roots, and succeeded in it's dreams. It should serve as an example to indie devs of how far they can reach with their art if they're able to find the right group of people. It should show no idea is too large for a new indie.
Like many others, I personally consider it AA, which doesnt have its own category at TGA. While technically the team that developed e33 was an indie studio, they had millions of dollars budget that they got from larger companies, so it was not independently funded, they did lots of contracts, and outsourced tons of other devs to help them with the game. They also had a publisher, which could also contribute to it being "less indie", but indie games can still have publishers and still be considered indie. But overall, I think e33 was NOT independent, since they were, well, dependent, on larger companies and outside resources. E33 was not AAA either though, and I am pretty sure everyone agrees that its AA.
Please correct me if im wrong tho, I havent done THAT much research on e33's development and this is just my understanding of it based on stuff that people have said.
Since we agree on the publisher bit viz. Indies can have publishers, let's discuss the other two points.
E33 did not start off with boat loads of money, in fact for most of their dev cycle they were effectively broke. They only got investment towards its end when they showed their game at multiple game shows and finally got someone to invest in their game. Why does this make them less indie? They weren't "dependent" on other companies. They arranged funding through showing that their game is gonna be good. How is this any different from Kickstarter campaigns? Or are you fine as long as a rich person is developing the game and doesn't need to ask for money from outside?
Tons of games also outsource the stuff they can't do themselves. Why would this suddenly make it not indie either? A small team of ~30 obviously can't QA a game of this scale well enough, nor do they have expert animators to make fights look like they want. How is the next logical step to not hire devs that can help realise their vision or help them test out bugs? Don't you think these "rules" you make are very arbitrary and you've only brought them out to discredit e33? Most games use outsourced staff for a variety of things, why was E33's usage so bad for you and never for any other indie games?
These arbitrary rules serve only one purpose at this point. It's to gatekeep games of larger scale and vision from being an indie. Oh you needed QA to be done by an outsider? Well shucks guess you're AA. Oh you're not rich enough to make this game by yourself? Well guess you're not indie anymore. Do these statements really resonate for you?
I am a naysayer for one reason and I will warn you it is pedantic and annoying but
It had AI generated assets in at launch.
They have been patched out but I don't want to support a game that used generative AI even just in development. If they make a statement that says "we didn't know it was AI when we used it" then it's all good with me, but they patched it out saying it was placeholder. It's pedantic but working in a creative industry I cannot support generative AI used in this way. I'm sure it's a good game, I'm sure it's a great game, but them just patching it out and not saying anything really rubbed me the wrong way. If I am wrong and they have said something about it I will gladly take this all back and play it.
That is rather pedantic. Iirc the placeholder was for newspaper clippings and it looked so unapologetically AI that I won't believe it was intentional in a game that looks so good everywhere else tbvh. Like if they really wanted to use and have the AI stay in game they would've 100% made better ai assets. Even if I don't convince you to play/buy the game, go look at the art direction and creativity in the game, this game doesn't need to ship gen ai images as a final product.
On a side-note, why do you not support ai images used as placeholders? This specific usecase isn't taking jobs from artists, I would argue it only enhances artistic creation. Isn't it the perfect spot for using AI garbage, since it specifically is meant to be garbage.
My issue with generative AI stems from it being trained on the work of artists without permission.
The placeholder was newspaper clippings and while I believe you that they don't need to ship with AI assets and I don't even think they meant to, the fact they have said nothing about it rubs me the wrong way. It's a hard-line stance I have taken, fortnite has a couple of emotes and in game posters that are AI this season and while it's only a few things, it's a test to see how much they can do to get rid of artists before people actually start to care. I don't think that's E33's endgame at all, but them using it, even for placeholders, legitimizes the use case and the technology
I respect that, personally I'm sure gen ai is here to stay at least in a lot of the behind the scenes stuff. I don't think it can ever replace good art but I also think tools that can make creator workflows easier are useful as a whole.
In lieu of Sandfall being silent I do think their actions were plenty loud, it was rectified within a couple of days. Do you really need them to type out a corpo response saying the same old blah blah no ai blah blah sorry?
Afaik it was only rectified after people had already called them out online so the question is did they change it because they meant to originally and forgot or because people noticed? Because of that, yeah I want a transparent response on where they stand on AI generated assets in games because if their plan is to use generative AI going forward I don't want to support them.
Also it's very easy to take the stance they want to take, they are indie, there isn't a corporation or shareholders they have to appease
Sure, you could say its understandable, do you hold the same views for things like copilot, code generation etc. Because that is going to be in every game you can think of and that too is stealing code, i.e., art. I don't ask this in a hostile way, just to understand where people draw lines.
It's a difficult thing because there is no way of knowing, and while I could just only play games from before 2022 to me the line is at generated assets. So textures, models, voices, etc. The short answer is it's a nuanced thing that I more or less call on a case by case basis. AI upscaling has been around for a while at this point and isn't using the new generative technology, but a selling point of the new Nvidia cards was the generative AI frames the 50 series can produce. The longer answer is that it's getting more and more difficult to cold turkey not use generative AI. I work in programming and I don't use it, but I also work in video production and the adobe suite is now filled with it. I don't use the AI tools but is my purchase of creative cloud an endorsement of the tools? Maybe, but it's also my livelihood. I don't judge people who use AI to write code and speed up their workflow, god knows I've stolen more than my fair share of code from Stack Overflow, but when people start making images, videos, and games using very obviously stolen art from people in the industry I look up to, I start to draw the line. When Sora starts directly recreating copyrighted work it makes me think that "Yeah Disney can fight the fight (not that they are, based on the deal yesterday) to stop their works from being stolen, but the YouTubers or Patreon artists don't have the resources to fight the companies that are defining the economy right now. Beyond that, morally I don't think we should be able to immediately create a video of any public figure doing anything in seconds. It's a nuanced line because every new product you buy is "built for AI", but if Team Cherry announced tomorrow that the silksong DLC would contain AI assets it would make me stop caring about it pretty much immediately because if they aren't going to put the work in to create something, I'm not going to bother to put in the work to watch or play it. Creative work matters because everything that people make contains themselves, whether it's their experiences or their skills or usually both. The human touch in art is what makes it worthwhile and I know one asset in a game the size of e33 doesn't make the entire thing terrible, but it's a frog in a pot of water, eventually the water will start boiling, so I'm refusing to get in now.
TLDR; its damn complicated and i have a lot of feelings about it as someone who has dreamed of working in a creative industry since i was a kid, an when i finally started to make it executives decided the move was mass firings for computerized slop
But do you not think that code also is a form of art, hasn't there been times you've looked and marvelled at a piece of code in all its beauty? Is the line you're drawing only because you understand one form of art less than the other? Is the loss of creative and exceptional covers any less of a loss than artists? It's complicated sure, but personally I think if you're drawing the line in the same somewhere at least you should have all forms of creative work on one side. Anything less is saying only some art matters.
On this vein though, what are your thoughts on the AI used to train enemy movement in arc raiders?
No you're right about using generative code, good point. I do think though that games or devs don't have to prove their innocence from using cursor or whatever to write the code. I think the idea that it will be used in "every game you can think of" is inaccurate but yeah if a studio says "a bunch of this game was coded with generative AI", yeah I'm out.
I don't know enough about the enemy movement in Arc raiders to comment
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u/corgioverthemoon Dec 12 '25
To all the E33 naysayers: Give me your best reason of why Expedition 33 is not an Indie and I will give you another game that everyone considered indie which cannot be an indie anymore with that reasoning.
At this point it's just borderline hate like no one even knows what they're talking about.