No, I'm not kidding. Of course, my angle is that as someone who grew up in the Golden Age of Shareware, I know there to have been a time when you would have asked someone in VC to invest and they'd look at you and go, "What, that small fad?"

I am not expert on indies, but I also though it is short of "independent" and means you are self-funding (or maybe crowdfunding) the game, and not relying on money on some publisher who has a say to the release and development of the game?

EDIT: I guess I was at least on the right track:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indie_game

I thought the point was whether you get money for the development from some publisher, who obviously has a say and power to the release and even development of the game. Crowdfunded game can still be considered an indie I guess, if the contributors don't get to decide about the release of the game.

I wonder how e.g. Markus "Notch" Person originally made and released Minecraft? Did he get funding from some publisher early on, did he have a day job or was he unemployed living on Swedish welfare, etc.?

EDIT: Well, the Wikipedia knows everything. Persson was a game-developer in a company (King) , but programmed Minecraft in his free time. Sounds and smells like indie to me!

Yes. Also, Dave the Diver is by no means an indie game, coming from a large Korean publisher as it does. Seems people just see 2D pixel art and go "indie!" without thinking. The developers themselves basically said "er, but we're not indie...."

There’s a problem with that overly simple definition. Many EA games are self-funded and self-published. The same goes for many Ubisoft titles. Valve is a privately owned company that is highly independent and self-publishes its games. And so on.

If we go strictly by the definition of “indie” as independent and self-published, then technically, all games developed in-house by companies like these would count as indie games, which clearly doesn’t reflect how most people use the term.

Edit - and i got hit by déjà vu. Had this exact disucssion 13 years ago.
https://www.gog.com/forum/general_archive/what_makes_a_game_indie_a_universal_definition

Yeah, that's part of why this thread began. Because there's definitely some delineation to be had.