Oh, it's always been around. Before the Internet even... It's always been there, hell as a kid I jailbroke my PSP and loaded it up homebrew games, some of them were quite good.

And before that, there were no AAA studios, there was only indie. Doom was made by an indie studio, Minecraft was indie, flash games were indie, even the original text mmorpgs played over arpanet were indie

They've always been there, often pushing the boundaries and trailblazing. It may not have been mainstream, but it's always been at the forefront of gaming, trying new things and trailblazing

Three things are different now - it's far easier to advertise and sell indie games, powerful tools are more available to the common person than ever, and modern gaming is getting worse by the day

Which is great, but also a double edged sword. Games (even fairly simple games) take a long time to make - like years if you do it consistently in your free time, or months going full time.

Early Access was great for this - you could put up the prototype, then raise the money and support to quit your job and hire an artist to flesh it out. But if everything is early access, nothing is.

Conversely, if you go into game dev communities (haven't found any great ones since I left that site), you hear all about people dropping $1500 for marketing that does nothing, because indie gamers tend to like indie style social media, and mainstream gamers you can easily pay to reach don't really like indie games

Skill with social media is key to a successful indie game, but there's not a lot of crossover between that and making a good game

So this kind of thing is huge - if piratesoftware recommends a game I'll at least look at it, because I respect his opinion on game design. If I see an ad, store page, or random clip of a game, I'm unlikely to look at it

Indie gaming doesn't need this because indie games are rare, it needs it because it's so difficult to find the hidden gems buried in mountains of mediocre games