Context: There was a huge backlash over Dave the Diver being nominated for best indie game because despite being a smaller pixelart game, the developer is owned by Nexon.
I think the indie games genre is just a vibe, not if something is really independent or not.
Like nobody is calling Witcher or Cyberpunk an indie game, even though it didn’t have an outside publisher. Conversley, most people would probably say Bastion or Journey are indie games, even though Warner and Sony published the games.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
The keighleys are a shitshow in a lot of ways.
My understanding is that it is a VERY small subset of judges who bucket the games into categories and then that is sent to the wider range of outlets.
According to the keighleys themselves: thegameawards.com/faq
How much you believe that last bit gets messy and is irrelevant to the topic at hand. But more than a few games media folk have openly complained that the pre-sorting into categories is just complete nonsense and all they can really do is pick what they know of once the final ballots go out.
So that is why you have shit like the Simulation (?) category that is a catch all for sports games, flight sims, strategy games, mobile games, rocket league, minecraft, etc. Similarly, you get cases of “… Dave the Diver is not an indie game but I guess it is the best game in the Indie category?”