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.

Comments

Downloading...

[Azraael]

I wonder how long their company is going to last if people can just download the games and freely distribute them on, say, bittorrent...

Good Luck.

[liloldme]

Good luck to the company, this is a worthy effort.

With all the complaints about how difficult it is for an independent game makers to get to the market (and the good observation that it so often comes down to marketing -- which is a large expense), I always wondered how come the independents don't get together and leverage the Internet as their jungle radio.

A website that establishes a community between independent game makers and game players where news and information, reviews etc. can be gathered and found. A known meeting place on the net just for the purpose of highlighting indie games.

There's a tremendous amount of grass roots marketing that can be done on the net, and there are many examples from other fields in IT where this has worked out extremely well, enabling start ups to create large customer bases (e.g. Skype) without having to spend ridiculous amounts to marketing costs.

I also wish Costikyan would do something to the awful style sheet on his blog, making it at least bearable to read ;-)