Sony-indie relationship seems to be working well because both sides enter the deal with honesty, transparency and respect towards each other and towards their audience.

SONY would have to dominate in market share to get 100% free exclusives. I mean 60%+. If you don't have that, there's nothing guaranteed from 1st parties regardless of how nice you are. Some exclusive content maybe, but not entire games.

A lot of what was spoken here is right.

And besides all that, some indies are pretty damn good. Resogun, Towerfall, Shovel Knight and Don't Starve for example.

Of course not all will grow. The fact that some will is good enough.

You comment about how not all indies pan out was pretty irrelevant. I mean, the Earth has a lot of water, too, but don't see how that has to do with anything.

Not dissing, just downplaying it in your usual passive-aggressive-I-think-they're-doing-good-but-not-really kind of way. They've done great for the indie industry. It is also a great business decision on their part. No one said (in this thread at least) that they were the "powerful patron of indies", what they have done was go in the opposite direction of MS' initial indie strongarm policies. Credit where credit is due. Geez.

This is something I can definitely agree with. Nintendo does just as well with Indies, but they barely get the recognition as Sony. 

Q-Games was making Pixel Junk now they are making The Tomorrow Children which is essentially 3D minecraft with lot of influences from other games aswell quite the ambitious game from its initial trailer. Another thing that caught my eye was some of there rendering techniques including their hyper realistic reflections dat Cone Voxel Ray tracing in full effect. Your theory is absolutely correct alot of third party developers are in big trouble whether or not they would like to admit but they wont do it publicly. These guys will come in and do a hostile takeover the market will be owned by them and publishers may even get sacked alot of developers are going the self publishing route even the Ubisoft guys making Wild are doing just that.

They also would have known several years ago that the spiralling costs of AAA development would mean less games. Hence turning to indies to try to bring some moisture to the desert.

Is this some sort of Ken Kutaragi 4D reference

But they've been working close with indies along time now, before they knew things would have to be delayed.