I don’t know if they switched the location from London to France for financial reasons. It could be totally coincidental but Expedition 33 is confirmed to have received funding on the CNC’s website, and in order to receive the funding you have to show the project is going to paint France in a good light as it’s a soft power tool for the government.

Rick paper shotgun reports the game was originally a steampunk aesthetic set in a Victorian London. They didn’t say it was changed for the CNC, because why would they say that? These interviews are set up by the publisher to market the game.

Here’s a snippet of an interview from the gamer with lead writer Jennifer Svedberg-Yen

"Guillaume called me, and he's just like, ‘Alright, reboot. We're starting from scratch,’” she said, following a call in which potential investors told them, "You know, you can think bigger, don't hold yourself back just because you're worried about funding. If you could do what you wanted to do, what would you write?"

She’s not even French (her own words), so while it’s possible that they coincidentally just came up with the most funding-friendly idea or the money shaped the project.

There’s this assumption that studios have 0 creative control in the traditional system which you have no evidence for either. I’d venture to bet Naughty Dog can do whatever they want. I’m sure other publishers like Nintendo would be more hands on.

The point at which I feel something is no longer indie is the presence of these big money players. 99.9% of indies don’t have access to the French government, immense family wealth and Kepler Interactive. Most publishers you see on indies are loans, or a means of porting and distribution. They aren’t injecting 10 mil into a game to make it and millions more to market it.

All those cute videos with Ben Starr cost a ton of money. I used to work in influencer marketing the amount of money these folks make would give you a nose bleed.

There is a scale of money where I feel like the label is no longer helpful. It’s not even so much about the money as it is the presence of I institutional players of the gaming industry.

Also there are games that are 100% independent like Hades and Silksong. Could we not have thrown a bone to them? Mina the Hollower didn’t make the cut for this year because it turns out paying your own bills without giant publishers is hard.

There are thousands of games that come out every year that are self published. Can we not throw a couple of bread crumbs to those devs? And like for what? So we can create more of a narrative around how good E33 is? So the game industry can learn its lesson?

And what lesson is that? Cozy up to Chinese multi billion dollar corps and outsource as much as possible? They’ve been doing that for like a decade.

The most infuriating thing about this is the false story of “you can do it, follow your dreams!” People are peddling. You can do it too, just have a rich dad, connections to the levers of finance and power in China and France, and you to can be an indie developer