I hope Santa brought you plenty of gadget-gifts to keep you suitably informed and entertained over the coming year; however if you're anything like me and dreading to check how many digits are missing from the bank balance, but still can't resist the urge to get some new games to play on your new toys, then you should take a look into Indie games.
Indie games are games which are created by small groups of people, or even single-handedly by an individual! This means that they have usually created the game as a hobby, and without any financial support of a large publisher, such as EA Games, Bethesta, Blizzard etc. Because indie games don't have the overheads of these large businesses, such as marketing, staffing, blah and blah, they normally only charge a few quid for them!
Now, you must be thinking "a game, made by some guy in his mothers basement charging me £2... sounds rubbish.". This may have been true a few years ago, and maybe even now, but the indie gaming market has developed massively in the last year. This is primarily due to more and more people having access, and faster access, to the internet. Ultimately the indie market success has come down to two words: "Digital Distribution", which has allowed easy and quick market access for the indie developers.I personally love indie games, the nature of them being developed by a team or individual with an idea, without a publisher ball and chain around their ankles demanding they make billions of dollars from it. I find that this allows indie games to be more creative and I'll tell you now there are a lot of abstract indie games out there which are a lot of fun!
I think that's about enough of me waffling about the games and show you some!
One of the major indie game developers which have seen leaps and bounds of success over the year are Mojang. Mojang are the creators of the hugely popular Minecraft, which when started by a single developer, Markus Persson, is Sweden has grown into one of the largest indie development teams. You can find their website here: http://mojang.com/
Another great source of indie games is on the popular gaming platform Steam; a list of indie games on Steam can be found at: http://store.steampowered.com/genre/Indie/
And finally one of my personal favourites, http://www.humblebundle.com/ . The humble bundles are 'packs' of games which you are free to choose how much you pay for them, and a percentage of what you spend goes to charity! Isn't that great? You get a bunch of games, for whatever price you want, and you're helping a charity!
These are just a few places to get indie games, but there are hundreds, if not thousands, out there which are a lot of fun to play for very reasonable prices.
I hope you go forth into the indie gaming world and enjoy all the games as much as I have, and in doing so you are helping grow the developers and community, which will only lead to expanding it more!
