Geoff Keighley weighs in on the Game Awards 'Best Indie' nominees controversy

“Independent can mean different things to different people, and it’s sort of a broad term. You can argue, does independent mean the budget of the game, does independent mean where the source of financing was, does it mean the team size? Is it the kind of independent spirit of the game, meaning a smaller game that’s sort of different?

I think everyone has their own opinion about this, and we really defer to our jury of 120 global media outlets who vote on these awards, to make that determination of ‘is something independent’ or not.

You know, in other industries, sometimes there are things – I think in the film industry the budget can’t be above this amount of dollars or it’s not independent, so I don’t know. …If you have a publisher, is that still indepedent or not?

(Dave the Diver) is made by a group named Mint Rocket, it’s a smaller game from a smaller group but it’s part of Nexon, they’re employees of Nexon which is a very large publisher. So I think it’s a fair debate and discussion – is that game truly independent, or is it not? And you can kind of argue it either way. It’s independent in spirit, and it’s a small game, I don’t know what the budget is but it’s probably a relatively small-budget game, but it is from a larger entity, whereas there are other games on that list that are from much smaller studios.

But even something like Dredge is published by Team17, so is that independent or not, because you have a publisher? It’s a really complicated thing to figure out and come up with strict rules around it, so we let people use their best judgement, and you can agree or disagree with the choices. But the fact that Dave the Diver was on that list meant that out of all the independent games that the jury looked at, or what they thought were independent games, that was one of the top five that they looked at this year.”