Digital distribution has given the independent games scene a major boost. No longer are publishers or shareware discs needed to get the creations of small developers with no marketing budgets or prowess into the hands of gamers. Over the last decade, we’ve seen the level of attention indie games receive in the media greatly increase, oftentimes approaching that of games from major publishers — perhaps not on par with the latest Call of Duty or Halo, but anyone who routinely reads a gaming website or magazine has likely seen the name Braid or Super Meat Boy pop up once or twice.
What we hear about much less often, at least in the West, are the games being made by independent developers located in Japan. There are, of course, exceptions, like Q-Games’ PixelJunk series making a name for itself, and the wonderful Cave Story now having made it to a handful of platforms in the U.S., but the key thing to note is these are exceptions. The number of independently developed games in Japan that we see released or even talked about here is not reflective of how many of these games there actually are. But with numerous hurdles in the way — language and time zones, for starters — most of them go unnoticed if they don’t have the good fortune of being developed by an especially prominent individual or company.
