The indie scene is hardly a new thing. In fact the Indie scene was prevalent and thriving during the early 80’s. When games where being designed for early computers they were often simple games created by individuals at home. This is because there were hardly any game developing companies at the time and people were beginning to experiment and have fun with new technology.
They were distributed through magazines and “micro fairs” which were essentially trading fairs for designers to meet their player base and sell their games directly.
Shops never sold games at the time. You could either mail-order them programme them yourself or buy the tapes from the developers.
At the beginning of the 80’s there was an emergence of DIY attitude within society and people were experimenting with creating their own things. People were experimenting with home computing and the simplicity of the script language at the time meant that game development was quite accessible.
Jeff Minter is an Indie developer who started creating independent games commercially in 1981. He created games such “Attack of the Mutant Camels” and “Hover Bovver.” He has recently been working Polybius a shooting/ racing game that was released on Playstation in 2017. In 2014 he was working on something he called the “minotaur project” in which he would design games for IOS but in an old console style. This project unfortunately was an overall net loss but led Minter to the creation of Polybius.
Indie is far from new it would be fairer to say that it was the ignition for video games and due to online gaming markets that opened the accessibility for developers, is only recently making a comeback.
The development of mobile phone apps and online software such as steam has meant that Indie developers have a better chance at competing with large scale game companies. In recent years there has been a huge increase in the number of available indie games on the market. I think that the term Indie has become partially meaningless as it no longer applies to any game that is created independently. Indie has also become a style, a label.
I do not think Indie is completely meaningless as the term still applies to games that are independently created. On the other hand Indie is often a trendy term used by indie developers to help aid sales. Mainstream games often try to mimic indie game style to cash in on the indie movement. I also think that due to mass influx of Indie games on the market in such a short amount of time has created varied meanings of the word Indie. It can be a style, a descriptor or literally a buzzword used to get people excited.
Sources
http://tig.wikia.com/wiki/History_of_Independent_Games
http://www.minotaurproject.co.uk/frontpage.php
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=jeff+minter&rlz=1C1CHBD_en-GBGB771GB771&oq=jeff+minter&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.1536j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8