A Space for the Unbound Took Me on an Emotional, Nostalgic Anime Pilgrimage

ign.com:

Since late 2021, I’ve been tinkering away at a little column here on IGN.com highlighting indie games I thought were neat. It’s been running quietly away on Saturday afternoons, throwing spotlights on little games and developers that weren’t otherwise getting a lot of attention from mainstream gaming sites like ours.

I’m proud of that coverage up to today, but today I’m extra proud, because my quiet year-plus efforts are about to get much, much louder. My little column today joins a much larger IGN initiative to bring editorial columns of all varieties into the spotlight. Which means I get to take a moment to wax poetic about what my corner of this initiative is actually all about.

Indie game coverage is always a tricky question to answer, especially on sites like this one. With a large audience that rightfully expects us to cover all the biggest beats across games and entertainment every day, combined with the massive size of both industries, it’s inevitable that the vast majority of our resources go toward writing about things people already know they’re interested in. I’m talking about the Marvels, the big PlayStation exclusives, the prestige TV shows, the Marios. Our audiences desperately want to read about those things, we love to write about them, and there are only so many hours in the day to write, so write about them we do.

And yet, the unfortunate inevitability of this is that it often leaves out the truly massive body of work being done by smaller, lesser-known or even unknown creators who don’t have the IP, the budget, the thousand-person studios, or the names to already be known by a mainstream audience. Sure, occasionally an indie surprise garners a large enough community to hit the mainstream (see Stardew