A lotta stuff happened in videogames in 2023: Baldur's Gate 3 released, a staggering number of layoffs occurred, and Dave the Diver was controversially nominated for Best Indie at The Game Awards.
It's got all the cosy, pixellated vibes that you'd associate with the Stardew Valleys and Celestes of the world, worked on by a relatively small team at Mintrocket. Which just happens to be a subsidiary of juggernaut publisher Nexon, with the game presumably having all the right kind of financial backing to support that.
It stirred up quite the discussion at the time: our own Tyler Wilde penned some thoughts on whether facts or vibes should lead categorisation, CEO of indie publisher New Blood Dave Oshry called the labelling "straight up bullshit", and Geoff Keighley played Switzerland by proclaiming "independent can mean different things to different people." Even Dave the Diver's director Jaeho Hwang told PC Gamer months later that he wouldn't consider his own game to be an indie.
Now, the game would go on to lose out to the excellent (and actually independently developed) RPG Sea of Stars, and the controversy quickly died down thereafter. The situation was dredged back up in a recent interview between Hwang and 4Gamer, though, with the director reiterating that Mintrocket had nothing to do with the category it was nominated for.
"I wonder if people mistook us for an indie studio just because we're developing games as a small team, or just because our art styles and game systems tend to be unique," Hwang said via translations courtesy of Automaton Media. "For some reason, we also ended up getting nominated for the Best Indie Game award, which caused some people to go, 'Hey, isn't that a Nexon game?', but it's not like we applied for the award ourselves."
In fact, the finger of blame should have been pointed at, well, er, us. That's awkward. The Game Awards jury is made up of a smorgasbord of over 100 different gaming outlets—including Polygon, Eurogamer, GamesRadar, PC Gamer (hey, that's us!), and Giant Bomb—who ultimately determine the nominees and which categories they're competing in.
Now I certainly can't be a spokesperson for every videogame website ever—and PC Gamer itself didn't nominate Dave the Diver for Best Indie, so please have mercy on us—so how we ended up where we did is ultimately a mystery to me. It's kind of wild to me that Hwang is still having to plead innocence almost two years after the nominations happened, but let us hope it serves as a reminder to not make the same mistake when the 2025 Game Awards roll around later this year.
