What Does Indie Mean in Games? The Definition Quietly Changed

Features

“Indie” originally meant independently funded — a game made without publisher money. It now mostly describes a scale and a look, which is why the word starts arguments.

Both definitions are in active use, often in the same sentence, and the gap between them is where every “that is not a real indie game” comment comes from.

The original definition: who paid for it

Borrowed from independent music and film, indie was a funding term. A publisher pays for development in exchange for control and a share of revenue. A game made without that money — self-funded, crowdfunded, or built in evenings after a day job — was independent.

Under this definition, the only question is who put up the money and who owns the decisions. Team size is irrelevant. Art style is irrelevant. A hundred-person self-funded studio is indie; a two-person team on a publisher advance is not.

The working definition: what it looks like

In practice almost nobody uses the funding test any more. The word now points at a cluster of traits:

A small team, usually under twenty people
A budget measured in thousands or low millions rather than tens of millions
A single unusual idea instead of a broad feature list
A visual style chosen partly because it is achievable — pixel art, low-poly, flat vector, hand-drawn
A price between free and about $25

Steam itself encodes this. “Indie” is a store tag that developers apply to their own games, sitting alongside genre tags like Action and Simulation. It describes a shelf, not a company structure.

Why the two definitions came apart

Three things happened.

Publishers started funding small games

Devolver Digital, Annapurna, Raw Fury, Team17 and Assemble Entertainment all publish games that everyone calls indie. Those games have publisher money, marketing budgets and release schedules. Under the original definition, none of them qualify.

Nobody is willing to say that out loud, because the games obviously belong to the same culture as the self-funded ones. So the definition moved instead.

Self-publishing stopped being a hardship

When Steam opened to direct submission and itch.io made hosting free, independence stopped being a mark of struggle and became the default. A term that describes almost everyone describes nothing — the majority of games released on Steam each year are self-published.

The aesthetic outlived the constraint

Pixel art started as a budget decision. It is now a style that funded studios choose deliberately. Once the look of a constraint became a choice, the look stopped proving anything about the constraint.

The edge cases people actually argue about

Three recurring fights, and what the two definitions say about each:

A self-funded studio with a hundred staff. Indie by funding, not by scale. Most people say no.

A two-person team on a Devolver deal. Not indie by funding, obviously indie by every other measure. Most people say yes.

A solo developer who raised $2 million on Kickstarter. Indie by both definitions, and the one nobody argues about — which tells you the argument is really about publishers, not money.

What we mean by it here

IndieForGames uses the practical definition, with one addition: we care about whether a game’s decisions came from a small group of people who could have made them differently.

That is why a Devolver-published game like Mycopunk sits comfortably on this site next to something self-published by two developers, and why a $200 million game with a deliberately retro art style does not. The useful question was never who signed the cheque. It is whether the game is recognisably somebody’s idea rather than a committee’s.

The honest caveat

This is a definition that cannot be settled, and anyone telling you theirs is the correct one is choosing a side in a disagreement about culture rather than reporting a fact. The funding definition is more precise and describes less of what people mean. The practical definition is vaguer and describes more. You will need both depending on what you are actually asking.

The one thing worth refusing is the version that uses “indie” as a quality claim — a shorthand for authentic or artistic. Plenty of independent games are bad, plenty of publisher-funded ones are singular, and the word carries no information about either.

Frequently asked questions

What does indie mean in games?

Originally it meant independently funded — developed without publisher money. In common use today it describes small-team, lower-budget games with a distinctive idea, regardless of who funded them.

What is the difference between indie and AAA?

AAA refers to games with very large budgets, large teams and major publisher backing. Indie describes the opposite end of that scale. The two terms describe production scale, not quality.

Can a game be indie if it has a publisher?

By the strict original definition, no. By the way the word is actually used, yes — publishers like Devolver Digital, Annapurna and Raw Fury fund games that are universally described as indie.

How many people work on an indie game?

There is no fixed number. Most people apply the term to teams under about twenty, and a large share of indie games are made by one to five people.

Is indie a genre?

No. It is a production category, not a genre. Steam lists it as a tag alongside genres, which is part of why the confusion persists.

Does indie mean the game is cheap?

Not necessarily, but indie games usually price between free and about $25 because that is where the audience expects them to sit.

Sources and citation

Google Trends — “what does indie mean in games” rising +150%, United States
Steam’s Indie tag — how the storefront itself categorises the term
Steam 250 weekly chart — the mix of self-published and publisher-backed releases referenced above

What Does Indie Mean in Games? The Definition Quietly Changed

The original definition: who paid for it

The working definition: what it looks like