Activision OK's XBLIG; you probably haven't heard of it, it's pretty underground [Update]

@dnelson1025
An indian giant?

@dnelson1025 I think this man is on to something.

@arucious

Eh-neeek-chock!

@dnelson1025
It's not.

@arucious
HOW-HOW-HOW
♫ Indian Giant ♫

@dnelson1025
There are many other big publishers publishing 'Indie' games. In fact, there are specialized 'Indie' publishers, an oxymoron if you define 'Indie' as self-published. Usually, however, the 'independent' part is meant only for the 'development' part of the game creation process.

An Indie starts at developing a game with a bunch of concepts and prototypes, and then continues to build code, art and music until they've got a finished product. Then they look for a publisher, asking 'Hey, we made this awesome game, would you like to help us bring it to the masses?' The publisher will agree in return a part of the profits and/or IP rights.

With non-Indie developers, however, the publisher is involved from the very beginning, assessing concepts and prototypes, and steering development for wider consumer appeal. In these cases the developer is not only assisted with the actual publishing, but also with the development of the game and is often provided with the initial capital to get started. This is a much bigger gamble for the publisher, so they get a bigger share of the profits, are almost guaranteed to own the IP and have a big influence in development. In return the developers get to make for bigger games than they could have on their own funds, not to mention the ability to keep a large workforce on salary during the many months/years of development.

So there you have it, Indie games are still Indie after being published by the big guys because their development was independent. They take more (financial) risk in return for much greater freedom. Of course, there is still something of size to be taken into account, otherwise we'd have to label Nintendo and the like as 'Indie' developers.

@FentonAlpha

Because $5 is going to break you.

@ItsameMatt03
He's not saying he can't afford it, he's saying he's not surprised that Activision's published it at (if I recall correctly) the maximum XBLIG price. Neither am I, really.

@darkinchworm

Yep, that's it. But saying that. $5 would actually break me at this point too. I'm not even kidding.

@FentonAlpha
Me too. Trying times...

@darkinchworm The maximum price for xblig titles is $10.00. There's a Japanese dodgeball game on the service (I forget it's name) which is priced at 800mspts.

@nerdquest

Yeah i remember that game.... i downloaded the trial. it sucked. I was hoping it would be like Super DodgeBall & River City Ransom... but it was more like sweat from my balls. Barely worth 80points they wanted 800. crazy.

@Skorpeyon
I don't consider any indie game indie if it was published by someone other then the devs.

@Skorpeyon - To be fair, the service it was published on was Xbox Live Indie Games so it can technically be labeled an Indie game in the same way that you can call anything on XBLA an Arcade game.

@darkinchworm
While I'm at it... I don't care how long it takes me to get used to the controls, I would pay good money for Warcraft II on XBLA

@Catalyst691
Also - as everyone else here is wondering - how does a studio like Activision - "go indie"? That's an oxymoron :P

@Catalyst691

to be fair, porting this was probably a fairly small endeavor.

That being said, yeah it's on console, the controls probably aren't awesome.

@Catalyst691 just maybe & this may sound crazy it could be a subsidiary division of Activision that is intersted indie games , sounds crazy .