Indie Companies Are Pushing the Industry Forward

"It's very important for us to continue to support this market and make sure the fresh new talent has a chance to learn and grow and express things."

-Shuhei Yoshida, from Sony on Gamasutra

Indie studios are not new to the game industry by any stretch of the imagination. If we look back on how games originally began, every company was an indie company and small companies have been producing games throughout game history. Even Sega started with small games before making Sonic. Today the Indie game scene is much larger, and is bringing much more to the industry.

Many gamers today have their favorite genre, , such as First Person Shooters, Role-Playing Games, or Action Adventures, but many people find themselves wanting a game that the triple A companies aren't putting out, like space shooters or arcade games. Luckily for all those unhappy gamers, indie companies have come to save the day, bringing all sorts of new and interesting titles to the scene such as Digital: A Love Story, Nidhogg, Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale, and many more.

Unfortunately, many people are underwhelmed by indie games simply due to the lower production quality of the indie market, but this is usually skin deep. What Indies lack in production they make up in creativity. A great example of this is Recettear, a 2-D game using older style graphics that has you play as the owner of an Item Shop that is indebted to a loan shark fairy that still manages to put you in random dungeons with a level mechanic.  I don't know about you, but I don't know many games that have a play style anything like that, and this shows only a portion of the creativity in the indie market.

We all have games we like and games we love, but sometimes we need something new and creative, something that plays outside the rules of the games done today. While the large triple A companies are all stuck and pinned by publishers and producers, the indie scene is free to roam far and wide to wherever their creativity takes them. The triple A scene may bring players in, but behind all the glamorous shimmering graphics lie the Indie developers, pushing and shoving the market forward and constantly bringing in new levels of gameplay and fun. We will always have people designing games that fit the current fad, but luckily for us there are many people who will design beyond the limits, and it's these developers that will always drive the industry. Indie companies have already started to change our games forever; it's up to us to keep supporting them.

<img src="http://imgur.com/9KNcf" alt="Indie Game:The Movie">

- Ash