Oh those guys? Yeah those are just the dozens of professional voice actors we could afford to hire with our tiny baby game studio budget! And those guys? Yeah that's just our 7-person "engineering" team. What do you mean your entire studio is 4 people?
suck off me
(for the record I'm not dunking on Hades or Hades 2 as a game this is just something that pisses me (and I assume only me) off)
Yeah, I saw in an interview. The game director found the lead animator while scrolling YouTube reels where he found videos of this Korean guy showing off some of his 3D rendering work he made in his spare time, and he asked him to work on E33. The animator said he had a full time job and couldn't move to France, they went on with him just working part time around his day job. As the project grew larger in scope and acquired more funding, then hired a few other Korean animators, friends and hobbyists, none of them worked on the project full time either, they all worked on it as a side gig (although some of them do work for legitimate studios)
It just so happens this probably saved the studio like a half a million Euros compared to an 8 person, full time, established animation studio with all the additional expenses that requires. It's kind of amazing how well done the animations are for something led by a guy who fucks around in Blender in his off time and posts it to his YouTube channel.
I'd say it's indie. The vibes of how it came to be are extremely indie. High budget indie, sure, but Ubisoft or Blizzard aren't outsourcing to hobbyists they found on Youtube, they outsource to proper studios or have an in house team. Plus their publisher is a co-op, so while there was a lot of funding from outside sources (moreso than basically every other indie game in existence) it's kind of a weird place. There should be a new term for it. High budget indie? What Star Citizen wishes it was.