Is SOMA an independent (indie) game?

[hip]

I'm making a list of my favorite indie games of all time but im having a hard time with this one. On one hand we know that Frictional Games are independent, they published the game by themselves and they raised money from their own pockets to develop this one. It was a team of 14 people when they worked on SOMA.

On the other hand we have the credit roll of the game mentioning more than 100 people who also worked on the game. The quality of the graphics, audio design and voice talent are phenomenal and it might have cost quite the budget as well.

So... can SOMA be classified as an independent game or not?

[Slithersy]

Depends what you mean by "Independent game". For 100 people, or even 14, I wouldn't necessarily say it's independent. For a game worked by Thomas Grip alone, I would.

[Торин]

Rhenj

[Novaturien]

An independent/ indie developer is a person or team that publish a game without a publisher. Team size doesn't matter in the definition, a publisher does. A publisher is where the money comes from to make AAA games in the vast majority of cases.

Funny to think it though, cause Techland can technically be considered indie, they just happen to make AAA quality titles and they sure struggled to keep that standard.

[MASTAN]

Originally posted by Novaturien:

An independent/ indie developer is a person or team that publish a game without a publisher.

You're saying Fez is not indie then?

[Novaturien]

Originally posted by MASTAN:

Originally posted by Novaturien:

An independent/ indie developer is a person or team that publish a game without a publisher.

You're saying Fez is not indie then?

In that case their publisher never asked to acquire the rights to Fez, so the game is independent from being used from that publisher or another developer.

[MASTAN]

Also into your definition would fall large companies like Ubisoft that can both develop and publish AAA games. E.g. Far Cry 3 is a game developed and published by team in Ubisoft.

[Novaturien]

Originally posted by MASTAN:

Also into your definition would fall large companies like Ubisoft that can both develop and publish AAA games. E.g. Far Cry 3 is a game developed and published by team in Ubisoft.

Truthfully there isn't a concrete definition for any of these "AAA" and "Indie" terms, we could argue the semantics about it all day long, but ubisoft isn't an indie studio, Ubisoft isn't just one studio either.

They acquire and absorb companies that also end up carrying the Ubisoft name globally. As an example, Ubisoft Reflections used to just be called "Reflections". They otherwise publish games through the companies that they acquired that are all listed on wikipedia