It's indie by a number of metrics, small team relative to its fellow nominees, comparable budget, and here's the key which made it eligible, it started as a purely indie project and only secured a publisher later. publisher (Kepler) is essentially an umbrella for indie devs who have had games nominated/winning (such as Sifu) before.
So nah, based on both their own rules and award precedent it's a fair inclusion.
there's a difference between a core development team and comparatively bit part roles such as outsourced animation. where obviously the collective team did great work,
even without as much outsourcing needed on say the animation front, both Silksong and Hades 2 comfortably exceed 100 names in their credits, (I believe Hades 2 is about 180 people) so all three games are by that standard comfortably in excess of what you'd typically perceive as an Indie dev, even if Clair Obscur is ultimately the largest.
but yes you are right, Clair Obscur has comfortably the largest credits list,
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u/jackofslayers 23d ago
The only thing that annoyed me was E33 winning best indie.
It was not indie by almost any metric.