I don't know if I would call Stardew Valley "less well known", as it's sold over 10 million copies. It's incredibly popular, one of the biggest indie game success stories ever.
I would also say Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley (and Harvest Moon, for that matter) and very different types of games (despite surface level similarities), so it's pretty hard to compare them directly like that.
It may be legitimate, but is it relevant enough to call one indie but not the other? I don't think so, since 30m and 10m are the same order of magnitude. Halo has roughly a similar ratio with COD, and both series are famous.
Stardew Valley is indie, because it was made by a single developer who was responsible for everything from coding, composing the music, writing the story and the bitmap art. Animal Crossing is not indie, because it was made by a large studio.
I see, I guess we had different definitions of "indie", but I think what you said sounds reasonable and there is value to understanding the humble origins of someone regardless of their current standing.
Without wanting to police the word, because you do you, "indie" comes from "independent", as in "independent of a publisher" (or, in music, where the word comes from, independent of a record label).
It doesn't have to be from a single developer, or even a small dev team, but rather from a team that is in some meaningful sense "independent".
This means, as an interesting example, that Minecraft was at one point about as indie as it is possible to be, and now is about as not-indie as it is possible to be.
We've been enjoying this on and off. It takes a while to understand and the controls aren't intuitive... And i think we've thrown away a sword or fishing rod but accident... Unclear
