I honestly don't get it. For one thing, 95% of "indie" games are total crap, usually rip offs of either classic 8/16 bit games or genres that have been done to death like tower defense games or the multitude of Minecraft clones out there. A good chunk of them are no better than the free Flash games you can find throughout dozens of game sites on the web.

Personally I think the whole "indie developer" thing is just being used as a talking point by console fanboys in the upcoming console war. You know... the same ones who now cling to how good or how much RAM a console has will determine its success the same way polygon counts were thrown around in the mid-late 90's, which were supposedly going to determine who would win the 32/64-bit and 128-bit gens.

More games available on your platform. More quality games available on your platform. The potential next Minecraft available on your platform.

Libraries sell systems. Cant hurt to have variety in that library.

A 100 games for the price of one.

And Let's remember that two of the biggest studios that made the greatness of playstation were first two small studios that were given a devkit before anyone else, because Sony trusted in them. Now that made awesome games for Sony three gens straight.

If you give a 100 indies a chance, 95 will make crap, 5 will make awesome games of wich 2 will stay loyal to the ones who made that happen.

Definitely, yes.

Getting more indie support increases their chances of getting the "next Minecraft".

industry is changing. indies are important to casual game market and a lot are quality. thatgamecompany, notch, many other indie devs who have moved over a million vopies of their games. perhaps they don't sell systems for the most part, but they keep the money coming in, and help cultivate new first parties that could result in strong consol sales over time.

think of the kinds of games we've seen from indies. there's a long list of great games. the last man, journey, transistor, octodad, trials, supr meat boy, fat princess, minecrafta, dwarf fortress, red vs blue, angry birds, farmville, mount and blade. I vould list a hundred others if I had the time.
no escape: zeros last reward, 999, flower, fl0w, machinarium, magicka, counterstrike was independently made..

That's quite possibly the reason. If you have a large group of Indie games, it's better than having none. And you still make money off them, so why not? I could see that.