[OPINION] Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Didn’t Deserve to Win Best Indie Game of the Year

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There will surely be plenty of debate around this topic, but it’s hard to ignore the bitter taste left when the award for Best Indie Game of the Year is placed in the pre-show instead of the main program. As if indie games aren’t important enough, or maybe I’m overthinking it and this was simply an attempt to fill space. Still, half of the Game of the Year nominations were indie titles anyway. And then, among the nominees for Best Indie Game of the Year, we had Absolum, Ball X Pit, Blue Prince, Hades II, and Hollow Knight: Silksong, prompting the question: is Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 even an indie title?

The answer depends on who you ask. Some will say it is, because the project started from scratch and gradually gathered a team through social media and the internet, without any initial funding. But then it comes out that the development cost a full 10 million dollars (according to the latest information), which may not be an enormous amount in the world of big productions, but it certainly isn’t small. On top of that, that money didn’t fall from the sky: Xbox surely paid a serious sum for the game to appear on Game Pass, and Kepler Interactive as the publisher definitely provided additional support after the success of Sifu, Cat Quest, and Pacific Drive. My stance is that numbers can be manipulated quite a bit, so it’s almost certain that more than 10 million dollars went into the game.

And so we go back to the eternal question: what is actually an indie game? In film terminology, it means that a project “is not tied to a major production company.” So if we look at it that way, Clair Obscur would still fall under indie, because it doesn’t have a giant like Sony, Capcom, or Microsoft behind it. But Kepler Interactive is still a publisher with a strong reputation and respectable finances. Maybe that’s why the most precise way to describe indie games is as projects made by individuals or small teams without relying on major support systems, projects driven by creative freedom and passion, resulting in more unique and experimental ideas, narratives, and mechanics.

If we follow that logic, Clair Obscur would technically still be indie. But this opens a whole new set of problems. Namely, this title won as many as nine awards on the night of the show, the most in Game Awards history. So let’s return to the other nominees: Absolum, Ball X Pit, Blue Prince, Hades II, and Hollow Knight: Silksong. All of these games undoubtedly deserved that title. But when one “underdog” sweeps almost all the awards, it feels as if there was a desire to reward the momentum and the story rather than the actual definition of an indie title.

By all parameters, the one that deserved the award the most was Hollow Knight: Silksong, a studio of only three people, many years of work, a proven indie pedigree. True, they also have more money today, both from the original game and additional financial backing. Ball X Pit is also the work of a solo developer, but Devolver Digital, standing behind the project, hasn’t really been a “small indie publisher” in the traditional sense for quite a while. Hades II is self-published and self-released, so by pure indie logic, they perhaps should have been the ones to win the award, even though they already received recognition in the action category. On the other hand, Absolum and Blue Prince have larger teams and publishers behind them, like Dotemu and Raw Fury, so it’s questionable how indie they really are.

The point is that the definition of “indie” is becoming more and more blurred. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, as great as it may be, simply feels too big and too influential to win the “Best Indie Game” category. You don’t have to agree with my opinion, but it’s hard not to notice the imbalance if you’ve played everything on the list. Maybe it deserved the other awards, it probably did, but the projects that truly live and breathe the indie philosophy also deserved recognition. Silksong or Hades II would have been more logical and fair choices.