Indie Games

            The world of game development has undergone a massive change over the past few years. Up until very recently it was incredibly difficult for a small group of people to create and publish their own game. Games only saw the light of day if an indie group published the game on their own website, or if their game got picked up by a big publisher. Self release was quite problematic for indie developers because it is difficult to market ones game when it is not in a larger marketplace, it was impossible to get their games onto the consoles, and they needed the network infrastructure to allow people to buy their games. Getting picked up by a publisher was also very difficult, because publishers often do not want to risk their own money on a game that might not sell well. This meant that the only games being made by small companies were not very interesting, because anything innovative  implies some sort of risk. This of course was not true in all cases, but indie developers did not have much luck releasing games up until this point.

            This all started to change around 2008 and 2009 when a number of groundbreaking indie games were released, and the world started realizing there was something to small  independent development. The first of these games is Braid. Braid was released in 2008 on Xbox 360, and it was one of the first indie games to be a huge economic success.  It sold 55,000 copies in its first week of release, and it received universal praise from the game critics. This game was only released because its creator Jonathan Blow spent 200,000 dollars of his own money to create and publish it. Without this Braid may never have been widely released, which would be a shame, because it made a lot of waves when it was released, and it started to get the gears turning for the indie game market we have today. Braid was a much different experience from what big game companies were currently creating. It was much more artistic then what people were used to, and it started to create a yearning for something new in gaming.  Super Meat Boy was the second game to break the mold and become a wide success. It was picked up by Microsoft after its creators released a widely popular flash game of the same name. This game provided something gamers had not seen in a long time, an incredibly difficult, and well polished 2d platformer. It was a call back to the days of the NES were games were simple and incredibly difficult.  People went absolutely nuts for it, and the game was a huge success. Due to such success, companies like Microsoft, Sony, and Valve created programs for indie developers to release their games, and the market has continued to grow.

             Indie games have become a huge phenomenon. Each year the gaming industry holds a huge gaming convention called E3. At this event most of the gaming's biggest reveals are made. This is the type of place where new game consoles are shown. Most of the time companies only talk about their upcoming blockbuster games such as Halo or Call of Duty, but this year things were different. Sony spent a good portion of their press conference talking about how they were catering to independent developers.  Sony even took the time to mention a ridiculous niche indie game called Octodad: The Dadliest Catch. This is a game where you play as an Octopus who is pretending to be a person. This is absolutely insane if you consider the fact that only a few years almost no one was playing indie games. Gaming now has a very interesting, and hopefully much more creative future.