it's probably a mistake to think of all those contract hires as "the dev team". the marketing guys are absolutely not developers. working on the retail product isn't the same as working on the game.

The problem with music labels is that, in the US, only 34% of the industry is independent, so as an artist you have way less freedom. Continuing to call music that has the vibe of independent music indie when it isn't at least makes some sense because it's not like artists have that much of a choice.

But with game studios, super small ones (and even solo devs) have put out hit indie games repeatedly, and there's an even stronger aversion toward "AAA slop" from consumers, so being indie is both more viable and more appealing. The problem is that now we got a studio like Supergiant that, in a better world, would probably be one of the biggest game studios in the planet, claiming to be an indie studio. That now raises the bar for what an indie game should be, in the mind of consumers a small indie studio can (and, therefore due to market forces, should) be putting out these massive games with dozens of fully voice acted characters with thousands of lines of dialogue.

At this point “indie” music just means “the music that doesn’t get heavy rotation on the top 40 pop stations”