Oh those guys? Yeah those are just the dozens of professional voice actors we could afford to hire with our tiny baby game studio budget! And those guys? Yeah that’s just our 7-person “engineering” team. What do you mean your entire studio is 4 people?
suck off me
(for the record I’m not dunking on Hades or Hades 2 as a game this is just something that pisses me (and I assume only me) off)
From a purely vibes perspective, the only true indies are mods, romhacks, and other user-created content like custom maps and levels. It has everything that one associates with indies: less mainstream, more creative, janky, not compromising vision for the sake of marketability, just being fucking weird.
The real divide is between mods/romhacks/custom maps and stand-along games, not small dev vs large dev.
I mostly just use indie for anything where the creators and core team actually enjoyed working on the project.