Sony today put on a presentation talking about why the PS4 and the company’s other consoles are becoming fond of supporting indie developers and their games.

Playstation’s Indie Showcase, given by Shahid Ahmad of Sony Computer Entertainment, was put on to replace the cancelled DriveClub session and was a talk on what indie gaming is, what it means to be an indie game developer and contained many little stories that are a good representation of how the indie gaming market is changing how the gaming scene is being shaped right now.

It began with an acknowledgement that thinking outside the box and going it alone is a risky and sometimes seemingly unpopular choice and on why people would want to go into Indie Game development if this was the case. Explanation of how self-publishing had paid off for people in other formats (Amazon’s Kindle and Youtube were mentioned) were then brought up and a question on whether publishing was dead. Ahmad gave his opinion that while publishing and AAA gaming titles were not dead, there was increasing competition for the best recruits to big game studios and a restriction on what they could do in the name of improvisation within the big franchises. He said that a passion and drive to make something that is truly what you want it to be is at the core of most indie developer’s ideas and that was why it was a growing market. People have ideas and drive and now some of the tools and know-how to make the games a reality.

There was talk about marketing and how important word-of-mouth and face-to-face meetings were in getting games known out there, how good relationships with other people leads to good business. Out of the many stories told to us, about games such as Starbound, Samurai Gunn and Rogue Legacy, what was noticeable was the mostly informal ways we were told meetings went from contracts being signed on the top deck of a bus to meetings held entirely over Skype. Again, it’s example of how different indie game developing can be to those of the big name studios.

It’s this that gives rise to the indie game ideas that come out, and because so much time is spent on developing an idea that is exactly what the developer wanted to make, Playstation is beginning to look upon the smaller studios and begin to work with them to bring these smaller games to the console market and even wider audiences.