Dave the Diver director says there’s ‘nothing indie’ about it, and he didn’t apply for its controversial Game Awards nod

The director of Dave the Diver has spoken about the previous controversy surrounding the game’s indie status.

Dave the Diver was nominated for Best Indie Game at The Game Awards in 2023, a decision which sparked some controversy.

Despite having the conventional low-fi appearance some indie games have, the game’s developer Mintrocket is a small team within Nexon, a South Korean company that made $1.8 billion in revenue in 2021 alone.

As such, many at the time claimed that Dave the Diver was far from an indie game, if one of the main criteria that defines one is a team that has a smaller budget and isn’t part of a billion-dollar company.

In a new interview with 4Gamer.net, Dave the Diver director Jaeho Hwang explained that he never considered the game an indie title, and that its Game Awards nomination was nothing to do with him, Mintrocket or Nexon.

Hwang explained that Mintrocket was formed to focus on smaller, lower-risk games while other teams in Nexon worked on the larger online live service games the company is better known for.

“We never intended to give [Dave the Diver] an indie game feel,” he said (via machine translation). “To begin with, we’re making a game at Nexon, so there’s nothing indie about it.

“However, when a game is made by a small team, the art style and game system tend to be unique, so I think that’s why it was thought of as an indie game.

“For some reason it was also nominated for an indie game award, and people were asking ‘even though it’s a Nexon game?'”, he recalled, before laughing and adding: “But we didn’t apply for it.”

At the time of its nomination, The Game Awards host and producer Geoff Keighley explained that it was up to the Game Awards jury, made up of global media outlets, to pick the nominees for each category.

“Independent can mean different things to different people, and it’s sort of a broad term,” he said at the time. “You can argue, does independent mean the budget of the game, does independent mean where the source of financing was, does it mean the team size? Is it the kind of independent spirit of the game, meaning a smaller game that’s sort of different?

“I think everyone has their own opinion about this, and we really defer to our jury of 120 global media outlets who vote on these awards, to make that determination of ‘is something independent’ or not.

“You know, in other industries, sometimes there are things – I think in the film industry the budget can’t be above this amount of dollars or it’s not independent, so I don’t know.

“Some people have said Larian with Baldur’s Gate 3, that’s an independent game. Kojima Productions with Death Stranding, some people say that’s an independent game. And even though that’s an independent studio, of course it’s funded by PlayStation.”

Keighley also pointed out that some of the other indie games nominated in that year’s Game Awards had publishers, asking: “If you have a publisher, is that still independent or not?”

Ultimately, despite (or perhaps due to) the debate, Dave the Diver wouldn’t win the award, with it instead going to Sea of Stars from Quebec indie developer Sabotage Studio.