The Game Award nominations are more proof we need to redefine 'indie'

The article makes a good point. There's little to no benefit in awarding a "Best Indie Game" prize for something under the wings of a megacorporation, these games at the very least already have the PR needed to be succesful. Let actual indie games have their time in the spotlight. I was going to argue that AA is still an useful label for games, if not as a measure of quality (as AAA also isn't) at least as a measure of how much investment or manpower went into making them, but ultimately I like their suggestion a lot more: Mainstream, Alternative and Indie, it's clean and should cover most cases.

I'm okay with small publishers calling themselves indie, you can't convince me that Dusk, ULTRAKILL, or Amid Evil aren't indie. However, we do need better definitions for what makes something "indie". Like, maybe New Blood's games are indie, something like Chilla's Arts is "garagecore" (made in your parents garage on a shoestring budget, without a publisher), Dave the Diver is alt-published (like the article suggests) and The Sims is AAA.

Whats more depressing is when I saw the indie game nominations I thought "Dang, this one is hard. They're all good, they all deserve to win!" But I didnt say that for any of the other categories with AAA games. There was one or two games that were the obvious picks, then there were other options you know would not win. But none of them had a stacked line-up like the indie games category did.