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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's creative director Guillaume Broche says the team would have preferred the indie awards at The Game Awards go to different teams.
Speaking to Edge – in an interview conducted before The Game Awards, where Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 received 9 awards, including Best Independent Game and best Debut Indie Game – Broche was asked, "Is Clair Obscur an indie game?" He explained, "In terms of budget, we are definitely more towards triple-I," adding that "It's weird because it's a 3D game with the kind of graphics that don't necessarily fit what you think of when you think about indie games."
The game's lead programmer, Tom Guillermin, added, "The project definitely started as indie in the very beginning, so I think that's the weird part of it, and now it's a bit bigger than that. It's hard to draw a line where you stopped being indie when you started with the same game concept and the same ideas that we ended up shipping."
Broche then acknowledged the nominations at The Game Awards, saying, "We'll see what happens, but we'd rather this category went to a smaller studio. I don't think we really needed this [nomination], even if it's appreciated." Clair Obscur would go on to beat out the likes of Blue Prince, Absolum, Ball x Pit, and fellow Game of the Year nominees Hades 2 and Hollow Knight: Silksong for Best Independent Game (as well as Blue Prince, Despelote and Dispatch for Debut Indie).
Granted, I think this is more of an issue with how The Game Awards defines what an indie game is. Sometimes it feels like either something self-published or from a smaller publisher like Raw Fury, Devolver, or Kepler. But then with Dave the Diver it was very much like a case of "this feels indie," despite being from a subsidiary of Nexon, which made a net income of ¥114.9 billion in 2021.
Guillermin raises an interesting point: where is the cutoff? Kojima Productions is an independent company and owns the Death Stranding IP; does that make it eligible? Probably not because Sony is too big of a publisher to work with for this, but in that case, how do you decide which publishers still count for "Indie" awards?
The Game Awards often has a bizarre lack of public facing category definitions, such as not-a-fighting-game Sifu being nominated for Best Fighting Game, while WWE games are locked to Best Sports/Racing Game when they are more of a fighting game than Sifu was. Or even this year's Best Fighting Game category which was made up of Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, a game that isn't out yet (2XKO) and three re-releases of older fighters.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 dev blames Final Fantasy 10 for letting you nuke its final boss.
