I didn"t say I agreed with all of the items on my list. I just said that I have heard other developers use these things as a means of disqualifying other developers from being "Indie". My point was that I think they create this definition based on what they are or what they hope to be soon. They then want to exclude any comparisons that they think might be unfair. Not that I agree but I can give you some of the arguments that I"ve heard on these topics that may make them a "little" more understandable but, according to my theory, you will only agree with them if this is how you see yourself.

My point in writing this blog post is to actually not to define what indie is but rather point out that there are a lot of different opinions and criteria that people use. I donâ(TM)t necessarily agree with all of the items on the list and most people donâ(TM)t. They can even have some decent arguments for some of these items that sound crazy to you or me. The interesting part is that I think they create this definition based on what they are or what they hope to be soon. They then want to exclude any comparisons that they think might be unfair.

I will need to add this professional and armature reasoning to my list. So, to confirm my theory, do you have anther job and make games on the side and do you feel that itâ(TM)s unfair for the guys who get to spend all of their time making games to be directly compared to your games? It sounds like you may hope that you game gets published by a big publisher but you donâ(TM)t think that should change your âoeindieâ status. Is this correct?

The problem is that it gets tricky. According to this definition one could argue that internally developed games at EA are independent. The question becomes at what point does a developer become big enough to be considered the big developer them selves. There are all kinds of examples that are more questionable than this EA scenario. For example, Bizarre Creations made the game Geometry Wars with their own money, are they âoeIndieâ even though they are a huge developer that worked for MS on a bunch of big retail titles? My point in writing this blog post is to actually not to define what indie is but rather point out that there are a lot of different opinions and criteria that people use. The interesting part it that there definition is constantly tied to how they perceive themselves and how they compare to other developers.