I am still a student, I read some articles about steam greenlight and EA as publisher. If you are interested in just google it. For example a developer of bf3 gave a great interview.
There are much more people who failed becoming an independet developer, because in the end you have to pay the bills.
For example Puppy games make great games but if you have a look at their blog they aren’t doing it to earn money. If you don’t have a luck-shot like minecraft, flappy birds (yes he earned a lot of money) you need money to promote your game. There are so many good games with low counters in the playstore because the people don’t see it.
I’m not saying the publisher isn’t important, or isn’t related to the developer. But the classification of the game stays the same regardless of where you get the game. An indie game does not cease being an indie game just because you buy it on origin.com rather than myindiewebsite.com.
But it does if it requires third party publishers to get it off the shelf. That is what makes a game an indie game, independent of publishers.
That is ofc different from independently developed, as we cleared up earlier.
The sad truth is that it really doesn’t matter what the term “independent” means. What matters is that, right now, it is a popular term that boosts sales.
But this isn’t really new, I mean, same thing happened with movies and music. The term “indie” keeps been thrown around depending on its marketability.
So… Don’t sweat it. Just know what you like.
As for games being more disposable today… I have the suspicion this is both due to the status of the industry (more market saturation that makes it less necessary to stick with a single title, plus people being more used to different genres so it’s harder to be compelling) and due to design (games that are disposable mean players will want to buy a new one soon enough).
Because I’d bet Titanfall 2 is already in production.