Download stores put small studios in front of console owners

What happened

Braid was mostly the work of one designer, Jonathan Blow, who funded it himself and hired an illustrator to give it a painterly look unlike anything else on the service. Its puzzles turn on manipulating time in a different way in each world, and it wraps that around an oblique story about regret. Reviewers treated it as a serious piece of work rather than a curiosity, and it sold in numbers nobody had projected for a downloadable title.

The promotion around it was equally important. Grouping small games into a marketing event gave them the kind of attention normally reserved for boxed releases, and the console maker had every reason to do so: download sales carried no manufacturing cost and no retail margin. For developers, the arithmetic was transformative. A team of one or two could earn a living from a game that a publisher would have refused to fund.

Within a couple of years independent development had become a recognized career rather than a hobby, complete with festivals, awards, documentaries and its own commercial pressures. The change was not purely benign. Getting noticed grew harder as the catalogues filled, and platform holders still decided who got featured. But the door that opened here stayed open, and a large share of the most inventive work of the following decade came through it.

The world at the time

Budgets for high-definition console games had risen sharply, pushing publishers toward sequels and licensed properties and squeezing out anything unusual. Broadband and console hard drives made downloading a full game practical for the first time. Small developers on computers had Steam; on consoles they had almost nothing until the download services matured.

What it changed

Sony and Nintendo expanded their own download programs, and every console since has courted small studios deliberately. Crowdfunding and early access later added ways to finance the same kind of work. The wave of independent releases that followed reintroduced genres and forms the mainstream had abandoned, from adventure games to systems-heavy simulations.