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Manifesto Games to Fuel Indie Development
Edge Online reports that Greg Costikyan and Johnny Wilson have joined up to form Manifesto Games. The two game designers are aiming to promote and develop the independent games market over the next few years with their ambitious start-up. From the article: "Manifesto will distribute all the games it publishes via its site, and while the digitial download sector is a hotly watched one, Costikyan says that even those already taking advantage of this space are chasing the wrong goal by offering casual games or publishers' back catalogue titles. This ends up selling games to people who aren't really interested in them." Costikyan will be blogging about the experience of getting the company off the ground from his site, Games*Design*Art*Culture.
I wonder how long their company is going to last if people can just download the games and freely distribute them on, say, bittorrent...
;)
People have been pirating (what are essentially) shareware games for decades, and yet we keep on truckin'. Besides, I hear many times on Slashdot that anyone who pirates games is only doing so to try 'em out, or otherwise wouldn't have purchased them anyway. So, surely we can't be losing much from piracy. Right? Right?
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www.dejobaan.com - Games that are sometimes pirated and keygenned, and y'know, it really makes me want to spit burning lava, but there's not much I can do about it.
We're indie. We're working on our 14th game.
Shareware is different than commercial games where you're actually tring to make serious money out of it... And yes, its true that people only pirate software to try it out and only make backup copys of dvds they own, etc... P.S.: I got this nice bridge in Brooklin that I'm willing to sell for cheap. Interested?
Manifesto Games might (or might not) be great in and of itself -- that's for Messrs. Costikyan and Wilson and the general game-buying public to decide. What I like about this is that we're seeing some smart guys pouring their sweat and money into "indie publishers" (such as Manifesto and Garage Games). And, so, it seems that some smart guys think that there's going to be a boom in the independent games market.
I would draw a parallel between these guys and PDA portals of the late '90s and early '00s, where sites like PalmGear and Handango handled marketing and sales, complementing the efforts of small developers. At that time, it was relatively easy for someone working out of his bedroom office to create enjoyable games of modest size and earn a living off of them. There were literally millions of PDA users hungry for entertainment software, and the portals led them directly to our games.
The desktop (Windows, Mac, Linux) games market of today is a much different, tougher beast -- there exist gaming sites such as IGN and GameSpot, which will cover smaller studios' products. But these are geared more towards larger titles (Doom 4 and Half Life 3), which often out-glamor what a small studio can develop. (Though I'll say that David Laprad always treated us indies well on Avault.) On the other hand, there are download sites such as Download.com and Tucows, which cater to the shareware market. However, there exist so many thousands of, well, mediocre titles on these services that individual games tend to become lost in a sea of others.
I take the founding of Manifesto to mean that we'll see a stronger spotlight on solid indie titles.
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www.dejobaan.com - Dejobaan Games
We're indie. We're working on our 14th game.