Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed. Hobbyist and homebrew game development had been in place since the first home computers in the late 1970s and 1980s, with the shift to shareware by individuals and small development teams in the 1990s, but the importance of console gaming and the rise of 3D game technology had made it initially difficult for individual developers to participate competitively in game development. The growth of AAA games with large budgets further made publishers risk-averse to support smaller games with non-standard or more experimental gameplay. Independent games, or indie games, gained a significant share of the market in the latter half of the 2000s that continued into the 2010s, and generally seen as a result of the industry looking for innovation beyond the safe, non-risky approaches that AAA development had centered on. Interest in indie games grew out from the booming Flash game industry of the mid-2000s which had drawn attention to individual and small developers normally overlooked by the media. Further, smaller developers were highlighted by the rapid growth in the mobile game industry, allowed them to complete equally on mobile app stores with larger developers. Crowdfunding through sites like Kickstarter became a viable pathway for indie developers to gain funding in the late 2000s, explosively growing in popularity into the mid-2010s, while early access distribution, where players purchase a not-yet-final version of a game to help play, test and provide feedback, was successfully demonstrated with Minecraft in 2009 and used as a model for some indie games since. On personal computers, Valve opened up their digital content platform Steam to allow indie games to be listed alongside triple-A games, and several other similar digital storefronts. Microsoft launched the Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) in 2004 which they used to publish games for the Xbox and later the Xbox 360 from smaller publishers and independent teams. Sony and Nintendo followed suit with similar indie game publishing programs in the early 2010s. Several indie games gained the media spotlight in this period, including Super Meat Boy, Fez, and Braid. 2010s In the 2010s, the traditional model of racing to a five-year console life cycle was reduced. Reasons included the challenge and massive expense of creating consoles that were graphically superior to the then-current generation, with Sony and Microsoft still looking to recoup development costs on their current consoles and the failure of content creation tools to keep