Why are none of the examples you mention remotely close to being indie games? Those are clearly not what a Long Tail business model looks like in video games. That Infinity Blade novella was written by Brandon Sanderson.
I did messed up here by mixing concepts from “Free” in with the concepts from “Long Tail”. I went back and re-read the Long Tail article from WIRED and edited my patent comment above to correct that error.