2007 was a startling year for videogames. The near-incessant flow of quality titles made it difficult for hobbyist gamers to track, buy and play every notable release.

The sheer cost in both time and money required to work through this catalogue of important or interesting retail-released titles, perhaps for the first time, forced videogames’ most dedicated (and well-off) followers into picking and choosing which titles they were to invest in.

Gaming forums spawned threads where posters bemoaned publishers for not timing their release schedules more considerately, in such a way we might more easily stagger our purchases to sample everything on offer. This glut of good – or at very least interesting – content forced buyers who would normally blanket purchase all of the big titles in a month (the demographic who, at the moment at least, keep the market buoyant and rich – into more focused purchasing habits, primarily within their preferred niches.

This fracturing of the hardcore is one of the first real signs of an industry maturing – there must have come a similar point in the growth of the movie industry when dedicated film-goers could no longer afford to see everything showing at the cinema and had to settle upon those releases that particularly appealed over others.

Alongside the success the mainstream industry enjoyed last year, indie games also experienced the largest boom in over a decade.

Wired’s Chris Thompson has today posted a piece entitled Explosion of Indie Games Kills ‘Best of’ Column in which he bemoans the fact he can no longer reasonably compile a ‘best of indie games’ list because there are simply too many quality titles to choose between. And that’s not even counting those he’s not yet touched.

He likens this explosion of quality niche content to what the film and popular music industries experienced as they began to mature.

‘Back around 1900, movies began as tiny, indie affairs — hallucinogenic experiments maybe five minutes long. In a few decades, though, moviemaking became industrialized, turning films into two-hour narratives that cost millions (in today’s dollars) to make. The sheer expense of making a movie meant that producers had to stick to genres that were proven to work at the box office: westerns, romance, mysteries. Experimental film died out.

But eventually, genuine auteurs got so sick of seeing the same, dull genres over and over again that they decided to buck the big-money system. The first generation of inexpensive cameras let them make movies on the cheap; with no stakes, they could do weirder, genre-busting films. Thus were born the indie movies of the ’60s and ’70s — and that revolution helped rejuvenate all filmmaking, even big-budget stuff.

As we pointed out last week, the ubiquity of Flash and broadband is helping to billow the indie games scene upwards, in a way that many traditionally ‘hardcore’ gamers might have missed – especially those of a console persuasion.

But, of course, the games born in this sub-industry are increasingly impacting the mainstream videogames market in a way that is exciting and diversifying, be it in the form of Jonathan Mak’s excellent Everyday Shooter (available through the PlayStation 3′s PSN service) or 2D Boy’s World of Goo which will shortly make the jump from PC to Wii. Follow some of the links in Thompson’s post to see how the ubiquity and availability-to-all of these left field small-scale developments is the first fruits of an industry finally entering its (metaphorical) teenage years.