While the indie game market has exploded in the West thanks to digital distribution platforms like Steam and crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, the genre has not really caught on in Japan, a country that has long been one of the leaders in game production. But Osaka-based game publisher Playism Games, a branch of  Active Gaming Media Inc, wants to change that.

Playism’s purpose is to publish foreign indie games within Japan, as well as to publish Japanese indie games internationally, but the country has been surprisingly slow to support the indie game scene in comparison to the U.S., Canada, and most of Europe.

“Active Gaming Media, our parent company, has been around since 2008, but Playism as a department and as a brand started just four years ago,” Playism marketing manager Nayan Ramachandran told GamesBeat. “It started originally because we had these disparate departments within the company  — localization, creative, marketing — and wanted to bring them together and form a brand. We focused on indie games because the people involved were passionate about the Japanese gaming industry, and saw the local doujin community as a chance to bring Japanese gaming back to prominence.”

“It’s too hard to define, because it’s so fractured”

In Japan, “doujin” refers to a hobbyist genre of fan-made products, whether they are comics, music, or even games. While in the West the term doujin is frequently understood to refer to something roughly equivalent to fan fiction, it can also be applied to original content.

According to Ramachandran, an indie gaming scene does exist in Japan, but it is fragmented and disorganized. “It’s too hard to define, because it’s so fractured,” Ramachandran said. “You have the indie scene, the doujin scene, the flash game scene, the small developer scene, etc. They’re all of varying sizes, but none of them really interact with each other.”

Ramachandran notes that one of the key issues holding back indie games in Japan is Japanese gamers reluctance to adopt a digital distribution model, but he is optimistic about the industry’s future.

“I think it’s just a matter of time,” he said. “Eventually, we’ll hit critical mass. The number of titles global audiences have an interest in will grow, and it will snowball from there. It just takes time”

photo credit: Ben Andreas Harding via photopin cc