In the west the middle AA market with smaller companies died some time ago. This left a huge gap and with newer tools the indie explosion happened. But in the japanese market the smaller companies never died out, you have tons of small companies that produce smaller games like Visual Novels, small RPGs and the like. Are they indie? Depends on your definition of indie. I see PocketPair (Craftopia, Palworld) be classified as indie by some. Kemco is someone who comes to mind with lots of 2D RPGs. Are Grezzo, NIS, Nihon Falcom, Grasshopper indie devs? They are certainly studios on their own. What with Level-5s guild games? They made some japanese devs visible, we never had heard of in the west.
If you define indie as not part of a big publisher and games with small budget and small dev team, then Japan has tons of indies.
You speak about localization, and it is quite possible, that if games leave the japanese market at all to the west, that localization is handled by some more classic publisher. Does that count as losing indie status?
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