If you’ve spent any time on social media this 2025, no doubt you’ve witnessed a very specific brand of gaming exhaustion. On one side, you have players marvelling at Clair Obscur: Expedition 33‘s high-fidelity Unreal Engine 5 visuals and turn-based combat that looks like it was a lost masterpiece by Square Enix. On the other hand, you have groups of people engaging in semantic war: do games like that deserve to be called indie games?
Sandfall Interactive, the team behind it, unsurprisingly considers itself indie. Our Clara Lester recently argued that limiting the definition to games solely to ‘those that are self-funded’ overlooks the full spectrum of the genre. And she’s right — to a point. But as we move into 2026, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the ‘Indie’ label has been stretched until it’s so thin you can see the corporate fingerprints.
So what’s the alternative? Should we re-embrace the AA label? Perhaps, but that too comes with a non-creative history — and a problem.
The Debt Gaming Owe to Wall Street
To understand why our labels are broken, we have to look at where these letters came from. ‘AAA’ and ‘AA’ didn’t originate from game design — they came from Wall Street. Those labels were lifted straight out of credit ratings.
In finance, AAA means low risk, high confidence; a ‘safe bet’ backed by massive corporate capital. When the games industry adopted the term in the ’90s, it was basically shorthand for the same idea: this is a game that should sell great and be released by a publisher with serious money. Gargantuan projects like GTA and the Final Fantasy series definitely count.
AA meant slightly riskier, but still very much a professional product. That’s why mid-budget movie tie-ins such as Star Wars: Rogue Squadron and LOTR games or experimental RPGs of the PS2 era like Rogue Galaxy were considered AA; they’re slightly more volatile but still a professional financial product.
That context matters because it explains why these terms feel awkward today. By this logic, AA should only be used to describe games made as for-profit products by big corpos — budgets, management layers, market expectations. When we slap that label onto a project that wasn’t built that way, the end product loses its soul.
The ‘Indie Games Paradox’ Nobody Cares or Wants to Admit
On the other hand, though, if we’re being honest, the way the industry uses ‘indie’ right now is, frankly, kind of nonsensical. Before the Steam and XBLA explosion of the mid-2000s that spawned Cave Story, Super Meat Boy, and Castle Crashers, no one had cared enough to label their games as indies or not. What matters is getting them to gamers’ hands — and making sure the team does not implode in the process. Let’s look at the hard truth from decades back:
- The original 1993 Doom was an indie title; id Software published it itself. However, Wolfenstein 3D was not indie; it was published by Apogee.
- The first Half-Life was not indie — Sierra published it. But, Half-Life 2 and its Episodes are indie because Valve published them itself.
“But wait,” you might hear some gamers cries, “Valve is a billion-dollar company!”
Honestly, it doesn’t — shouldn’t — matter. Independence is about the structure of power, not the size of the bank account. You’ve definitely heard Valve’s legendary, flat-hierarchy work culture, right? There’s nothing more indie than working at a company that lets you start, pivot, and drop projects at a whim.
The long-running Kickstarter saga Star Citizens, which is approaching a massive $1 billion in total player funding, is also arguably the most ‘indie’ game in existence; because no publisher is standing between the developer and the product. You can complain all you want that the team is selling more ships because Chris Roberts needed another yacht. But at the end of the day, backers are the ones who paid for it — not because a board of directors is frothing at their mouth over dropping sales or shares.
The term indie used to be a badge of counter-culture. It was Stardew Valley, Undertale, and Fez — true labors of love that bypassed the system and fundamentally changed the gaming landscape. But in today’s market, the term is frequently weaponized as ‘Indie-washing.’
Large publishers use the label as a shield to evoke underdog sympathy, while ‘small’ studios boast credit lists longer than PS3 blockbusters. We see this cognitive dissonance everywhere. Something as seemingly innocently scrappy as Dave the Diver was developed by Mintrocket, a division backed by the full corporate weight of Korean behemoth Nexon. Baldur’s Gate 3 — despite its long-cooked Early Access period — is supported by a 30% stake from Tencent as well.
Even indie darlings like Hotline Miami or Enter the Gungeon are technically not indie games — they are, after all, published by Devolver Digital. It sounds pedantic until you look at the ledger. The moment you hand over a percentage of your revenue and your distribution rights to a third party, you have entered a power dynamic that should mark your game as no longer independent.
Sure, you could argue that having a publisher is essential for the livelihood of independent developers anywhere. You get the budget and the marketing muscle to reach the masses, after all. But you surrender that independence, and sometimes, that comes with massive consequences.
Look at the catastrophe of Aeon Must Die!. Limestone Games alleged that the devs were forced to leave their own studio and could only watch their publisher, Focus Entertainment, finish and release the game. Similarly, the legal battle over Disco Elysium ended up having the lead creators of one of the most celebrated ‘indie’ games in history ousted from ZA/UM by investors.
Reclaiming the Game Development’s Misunderstood Class
If ‘indie’ is often mislabeled and ‘AA’ is reserved for corporate (relatively) low-budget, money-making product, how do we actually categorize modern development at scale?
The legendary creator of Touhou Project, Zun, touched on this cultural friction a while back. When categorized as an ‘indie’ developer, he pushed back on X. “Just to clarify to avoid misunderstanding — I’m a doujin game creator (not an indie creator), lol.”
Zun’s distinction here is actually quite vital in the Japanese independent scene. One might think that doujin is all about leveraging known IPs to create stimulating content — no thanks to the general public perception of what came from the community in the first place. But that’s only a small part of its creative freedom.
Basically, the doujin scene focuses on the ‘hobbyist circle’ spirit — making what you love without external interference. It’s about a community of ‘similar people’ sharing passion, whether it’s a group of like-minded individuals making fan works of an obscure dating sim or university clubs developing original shoot-em-ups. In contrast, the modern Japanese ‘indie’ scene mirrors the West’s struggle with scale and professionalism, being increasingly associated with developers who have left companies but still seek commercial success. They are two different worlds: one is about the soul of the hobby; the other is about the reality of the industry.
In terms of general scale, Western gaming enthusiasts are also attempting to solve this confusion, such as the HushCrasher Classification System or HCS. This framework suggests that there are two most honest metrics for a game’s scale: the length of its credits and its disk size.
For that reason, HCS proposes a new taxonomy that gamers might want to adopt:
- The Kei Games: Small-scale, intimate, oftentimes solo dev projects. Think Papers, Please.
- The Midi Games: Small-to-medium studios like Hades‘s Supergiant. They have a team, but they aren’t a corporation.
- The AA Games: The entry point for multi-million-dollar budgets. These are games with hundreds of credited individuals and middle management, but they still have the ‘freedom to innovate’ that AAA lacks.
- The AAA Games: If the credits roll for twenty minutes, you’re here.
Redefining the Indie Games Label in 2026
If a solo dev makes a game, it is inherently a personal, small-scale work. If a studio can do it without a publisher, it is a mark of being truly Independent. But if a team of 50 makes a gorgeous JRPG with the support of third-party studios as well as the safety net of a publisher’s backing and marketing reach, should we keep pretending they are the ‘scrappy underdogs’? Or should we finally find the courage to — proudly — call them AA? A for-profit, moderate-sized project that still retains its creative vision?
What we need — especially in 2026 — is a clearer distinction between independence and scale. One is about ownership and control. The other is about people and money. Mixing them together is how we ended up arguing in circles.