Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s Game Awards nominations show ‘indie’ is still a meaningless term

The Game Awards nominees have landed, and six games will jostle for the prized Game of the Year honor: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, Donkey Kong Bananza, Hades 2, Hollow Knight: Silksong, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. This year’s nominees have made history for the award show, now over a decade old, with multiple indie games vying for the top prize for the first time.

Though that history isn’t without a bit of head-scratching. One has to wonder: Is Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 really an “indie” game? Amid its 12 nominations — the most in the show’s history — Clair Obscur was nominated for both indie categories, Best Independent Game and Debut Indie Game, in addition to Game of the Year and a host of craft categories.

At first glance, Expedition 33 has a look and prestige that’s more aligned with a typical AAA blockbuster than smaller-scale indies like Peak or Megabonk. With Sandfall’s team size of around 30 core members and a smaller budget than you’d expect for a game with these production values, Clair Obscur would likely be considered a AA game, according to a classification system posited by industry data experts earlier this year. It’s a nebulous label that sits somewhere between indie games from small teams (like Silksong’s three-person Team Cherry) and the multimillion blockbusters that dominate sales charts, like Call of Duty.

Yes, Sandfall Interactive, the developer behind Expedition 33, is an independent studio, which might be enough to signify its standout debut as an “indie” game. On the other hand, Sandfall partnered with Kepler Interactive to publish the game, and through that partnership was able to drum up a budget that allowed it to cast Hollywood stars (Charlie Cox as Gustave, Andy Serkis as Renoir) and place it in a major publisher showcase. (I don’t think Daredevil could get cast in an obvious indie like Consume Me.)

One could argue that partnering with a publisher is the opposite of being independent, though in reality it’s highly common for independent studios to partner with a publisher to help bring their games to market and promote them after the fact. Raw Fury, the publisher of Blue Prince, specializes in it, for example. Even 2024’s GOTY contender Balatro from solo developer LocalThunk — an indie if I’ve ever seen one — had a publisher in Playstack, which has published games like Mortal Shell and The Case of the Golden Idle.

In some ways, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is reminiscent of 2023’s Baldur’s Gate 3. Both games captured the zeitgeist of the industry during the years they came out, and both were (fairly or unfairly) held as bastions for what AAA games can aspire to be, and what independent studios can do when freed from the clutches of monopoly-like parent companies. (Sandfall was founded by ex-Ubisoft developers.)

Baldur’s Gate 3 was self-published by Larian Studios, and, in every sense of the word, it was made independently. Unlike Expedition 33, however, Baldur’s Gate 3 didn’t get nominated for Best Independent Game. (Controversially, Dave the Diver was nominated for the category in 2023. Its retro-inspired, pixel art look and low price point of $19.99 certainly flagged it as an “indie” game, but it was developed and published by Mintrocket — a subsidiary of Nexon, the South Korean gaming giant.)

Image: Larian Studios

The other titles in The Game Awards’ Best Independent Game category — Absolum, Ball x Pit, Blue Prince, Hades 2, Hollow Knight: Silksong — are all unequivocally indie games. Ditto for the Debut Indie Game nominations joining Blue Prince and Expedition 33: Despelote, Dispatch, and Megabonk.

Dispatch, though, falls into a similar gray area as Expedition 33. It certainly has the look, scope, and price of an indie game, but is it any more “indie” than Expedition 33? Its comic-book-come-to-life art style doesn’t have the same lifelike, Unreal Engine 5 appearance that we expect from non-indies, but its voice cast features Hollywood talent (Aaron Paul, Jeffrey Wright), and Critical Role helped fund its final stretch of development, in addition to some of its members playing key characters. Dispatch studio AdHoc had around 30 employees when the game was shown off at last year’s The Game Awards, meaning it’s comparable in size to Sandfall. (Of course, plenty more people contributed to Expedition 33 outside of the studio.)

Image: AdHoc Studio via Polygon

All in all, the consternation around what is “indie” and what’s not isn’t going away any time soon. We’re still early in the 2025 awards race, and I wouldn’t be surprised if more awards bodies view Expedition 33 and developer Sandfall as indie, like the Indie Game Awards has. (For what it’s worth, director Guillaume Broche called the studio “triple-I” when speaking to Eurogamer earlier this year, which… just adds another wrench into this classification discussion.)

Perhaps Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 nabbing nominations in the independent categories is a course correction by the jury (of which Polygon is a contributing outlet) after Baldur’s Gate 3 wasn’t considered indie in 2023. Or maybe it’s an attempt to define indie games as those made by independent teams, regardless of budget or scope. Or maybe it happened because we still don’t have the best language and labels to accurately describe games in comparison to one another.

At this point, maybe an indie game is simply classified the way porn is: you know it when you see it.