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Jason Gastrow, otherwise known as Videogamedunkey, or just Dunkey, is a YouTuber who talks about and reviews games on his channel. For years, he's covered games both big and small, using his trademark sarcastic humor to build on his career as a game reviewer that has over 7 million subscribers. His latest video was not about a specific game, and instead was an announcement for Dunkey's new independent game publishing label called Bigmode. According to Dunkey, too many good indie games are "getting lost in a sea of mediocrity", and he's tired of just sitting on the sidelines merely reviewing games after they release, and now he wants to be directly involved.

"I am not looking for creative control", Dunkey explains, claiming that he wants to be involved, and for Bigmode to act as a seal of approval. His brand would, in theory, offer developer-friendly contracts, and help promote quality games that have substance, over anything else. Dunkey leverages the fact that he knows what good games are, after years of promoting various indie titles on his channel, such as Undertale, Cuphead, Hades, and others.

 

[GammaPhonic]

To be honest I don't agree at all regarding self-publishing as a condition for classifying a game as indie, and that is the reason I ask for sources regarding that definition of an indie game.

I propose that if a game is independently developed it is an indie game, no matter how it was distributed/published.
I don't have sources other than me for that definition.

What would be a general commonly-agreed source regarding what an indie game is? who is an authority regarding that term? Is there any broadly agreed definition for what is an indie game?

Well, in reality it doesn't really matter does it? It's only a label. But the industry as a whole seems (in my view anyway) to favour the independently developed definition. I say this because there are publishers that describe themselves as indie publishers and platform holders such as Microsoft and Nintendo describe independently developed games as Indies even if they have a publisher.

 

[orangy57]

literally never seen him play an obscure indie game then again i havent watched one of his videos in ~5 years so idk what hes up to now

just watched the video and literally every indie game which he praised was something that had a publishing company already since most of them were devolver games. Interested to see what games they publish but what clients are they even looking for??

 

[shadow1w2]

First I heard of him.
Wish them luck but I have a bad feeling about em.
Hope devs dont fall into a trap.
Hopefully I'm wrong and they really take it seriously but "trademark sarcasm" isnt exactly easy to trust.

 

[Jacklack3]

Then a lot of games are indie titles since they're a game studio (independent) doing work to be published. This is totally wrong and the meaning Indie have never meant a independent game studio.

For example Stardew Valley is actually not a indie title until recently. It was published by Chuckle Fish. Just because it's a "simple" game doesn't make it a indie title.

?????????
stardew valley was like almost all made by like one dude. i think the majority of people if asked would say the game has always been indie with that information. publishing only takes care of, well, publishing. they just take care of showing your game to people. if me and another dude made music on our own, with no help, we're both independent. even if he gets success from using DistroKid to publish to Spotify, and i only get success from using something like SoundCloud or Bandcamp. if we get a label though that helps in the development however, then we wouldn't be indie.

 

[Augusto101]

Probably another failure of videogame

 

[sarkwalvein]

Yeah, the videogame community/fanbase is a failure I know. It never fails to disappoint.