A decade of championing Japan's indies: The story of BitSummit
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Casting our eyes back to indie games in Japan in 2012 paints a different picture to what we see today: no less capable than what is seen internationally, but one that was private, small, and lacking commercial and cultural awareness both at home and abroad.
Q-Games was the exception, its initial self-publishing efforts and later partnership with Sony bringing the popular Pixeljunk series to life as one of the shining examples of indie prowess on the PS3. With a gap in its schedule, the developer did what any studio would do: it founded an indie games convention dedicated to showcasing the efforts of indie creators in its home city of Kyoto, Japan, known as BitSummit.
The story's a bit more complex than that, but that's for John Davis, event co-founder and organizer of many hats (he also runs PR for newly-founded Japanese indie games publisher Shueisha Games alongside working as a consultant) to explain.
"We were going overseas a little bit for events like PAX and seeing the communities that were building there that had been coming up since the early 2000s, both critically and financially, but the same thing wasn't happening in Japan," he explains. "Everybody was very insular, protecting what they were working on and not really working together or promoting each other. There hadn't been a big exodus from big developers to the smallest studios either, and if there was like, an exodus it was to mid-tier studios like Grasshopper [Manufacture]. There weren't a lot of smaller teams getting together since it's always been a doujin and hobby kind of culture in Japan.
"Even the idea of going indie was kind of a bad word, you know? You want to go and
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