By Luke Thomas, December 9, 2025
While “Clair Obscur: Expedition 33” fits the precedent that The Game Awards have set for what an indie game is, its nomination highlights the core problem with the classification and the show.
The annual award show’s indie category has simply become too broad, as this year’s Best Debut Indie Game category pitted the AA-sized, 400-man developed juggernaut that is “Clair Obscur: Expedition 33” against the two-man developed “Megabonk,” a match-up that doesn’t seem fair in any sense.
The indie categories should instead be putting focus on the small-scale developed games to shed more light on that underrepresented side of the industry. “Expedition 33” certainly is an achievement, but it’s one that was highly supported throughout its creation and shouldn’t have been nominated for the indie categories.
To trace back to context, “Expedition 33,” Sandfall Interactive’s RPG that took the world by storm, became the most nominated game by The Game Awards, totaling 12 nominations. That achievement is partly due to two under the categories Best Independent Game and Best Debut Indie Game, to which a divide rightfully grew on whether Sandfall Interactive’s first game was an indie game.
While “Expedition 33” wasn’t developed by a major studio in the games industry, the baseline factor for whether a title is indie, the game’s massive scale of production and budget have raised eyebrows at the title’s inclusion in the indie categories, mine included.
The game was also nominated similarly at The Indie Game Awards 2025 for the main prize and Debut Game, where similar blowback occurred, though less prevalent given TIGA’s considerably lower notoriety.
This isn’t the first time The Game Awards have caught flack for nominees in the indie categories either. “Dave the Diver” caught a lot of controversy in 2023 for being developed and published by MintRocket, a subsidiary of the South-Korean conglomerate Nexon.
Host of the Game Awards Geoff Keighly addressed the inclusion of “Dave the Diver” in a Twitch interview with VGC, taking a lacking viewpoint the title was “independent in spirit.” But despite the commonly held belief, Keighly isn’t the man behind the curtain pulling the strings on which games get nominated.
The voting for the nominees is done independently through an “international jury of over 100 global media and influencer outlets,” with each outlet creating its ballot based on its staff’s collective opinions. So, based on the wide range of outlet staff’s perspectives, “Expedition 33” qualified as an indie game to enough people to get a nomination.
“The independent games that the jury looked at, or what they thought were independent games, (“Dave the Diver”) was one of the top five that they looked at this year,” Keighly said in the VGC interview.
Then, what is the definition that those judges follow that The Game Awards have set forth? The show’s site broadly describes the Best Independent Game award as “for outstanding creative and technical achievement in a game made outside the traditional publisher system,” an extremely broad and unclear description.
Indie games, or independent games, initially were exactly as they sounded, games developed and published by small, independent studios, but that classification faded away fully in the 2010s with the rise of self-proclaimed “indie publishers,” notably Devolver Digital.
The term “indie” now exists within a “you know it when you see it” position, the only consistent definition being the games are from developers outside the major publisher scene’s AAA games.
Even the idea that major publishers can’t be involved to be considered indie has shifted, as games like Ember Lab’s “Kena: Bridge of Spirits,” the winner of the two indie awards back in 2021, partnered with Sony for support with the game’s funding and marketing.
Shifting back to “Expedition 33,” the developers at Sandfall Interactive themselves have deemed their game as AA, a tier for mid-sized games that exists in an even more undefined spot between indie games and the AAA titles of major publishers. And that disarray is seen in the individual aspects of “Expedition 33’s” development.
While Sandfall Interactive’s core team only boasts around 30 people, the game’s credits featured 412 people, 403 professional roles and nine special thanks. The credits showcase the heavy outsourcing to other studios and a number of prolific actors, which are both metrics used to argue “Expedition 33” doesn’t fit the bill for an indie game due to the production scale.
But other indie games have also rallied up high credit counts, Sabotage Studio’s Best Independent Game winner, “Sea of Stars,” featured 431 people in the credits, although only 276 were professional roles. The previously mentioned “Kena: Bridge of Spirits” also featured a high 371.
“Expedition 33’s” own publisher Kepler Interactive has also routinely published games showcasing large numbers of people who worked on them. 2022’s “Sifu” featured 290 people in the credits, and 2024’s “Pacific Drive” featured 370. Both titles were nominated for Best Independent Game but didn’t receive any of the backlash the nomination of “Expedition 33” received.
Featuring prolific actors shouldn’t, and doesn’t, discredit a title from being indie either, as considerably indie AdHoc Studio’s “Dispatch” features major actors, including Aaron Paul and Jeffrey Wright.
The budget of “Expedition 33” is also a talking point, with extensive funding from Kepler Interactive and rumors of family backing. While no official number has been put down, the portfolio director of Kepler Interactive has said the game likely cost less to develop than 2008’s “Mirror’s Edge,” putting the budget in the ballpark of $20 million. While $20 million certainly is a massive number, the budgets of this year’s other nominees, “Hades 2” and “Hollow Knight: Silksong,” being sequels to massively successful previous titles likely ended up having budgets in a similar range, although the merit of being self-funded makes the two titles stand as more independent.
By the individual accounts, “Expedition 33” technically qualifies as an indie game by the precedents set in the past, and its studio independence allowed for the main team to keep creative freedom.
But, putting all of those elements together, “Expedition 33” pushes the envelope and the classification that makes the most sense is AA, which is what I would consider the game, but it could still be viewed as indie, which shows the current meaninglessness of the term.
To reinstate the opening argument back down, the ever-widening criteria for the indie game classification showcases that The Game Award’s two indie categories should be reevaluated to place more focus on the smaller side of the gaming industry.
But perhaps too much weight is placed on the award aspect of The Game Awards. Despite the name, it’s a glorified advertisement show with less than 20% of the show actually focusing on the awards and speeches, as the award winners are told to speed through their sentiments with a “Please Wrap It Up” sign.
“The people who run the game awards do not know what an indie game is, similar to how the people who run every other award show actively hate the thing they are awarding, and should not be taken seriously under any circumstance,” said Jack Soucie, an undeclared student and member of the CPP Game Development Club.
It’s clear the actual awards and artistry were never the priority for The Game Awards, the awards themselves largely exist to present a narrative of the industry.
Any problem that The Game Awards may have, it doesn’t appear to be in Keighly’s top interest to make it the best it can be.
Feature image courtesy of Expedition 33 Official Instagram
