Manifesto Games Closes
It was announced yesterday that after nearly three years in service, Greg Costikyan has decided to close down Manifesto Games, one of the few digital distribution sites out there that heavily featured and actively promoted a considerable number of indie games on their catalogue.
Play This Thing will continue to be updated regularly, but losing Manifesto Games is still a big shame, especially for indie game developers who had problems acquiring publishing deals from other distribution channels.
[UPDATE: Costikyan has made detailed comments on why he's closing Manifesto, via the still-updating Play This Thing blog.]
Comments
Who? No, really. Never heard of them.
Posted by: James | June 24, 2009 8:41 AM
Likewise. Their PR must have been poor-to-nonexistant if they've been around all this time and I've still never knew they existed.
No developers or sites I know of ever mentioned them either.
Posted by: Dominic White | June 24, 2009 9:04 AM
Nah, Manifesto were very well publicised initially.
The trouble was mainly that, as one cynic put it when they launched, they were more of a shop than a publisher. You could put your game up on their site and they'd give you a good royalty or you could put it up on your own site and keep all the money.
That kind of arrangement can be worth it if the shop in question has a lot of traffic, but there was never much reason for traffic to go to Manifesto in the first place. The vast majority of what they sold (or at least the subset I cared about) was available directly from the various developers.
Posted by: Dom Camus | June 24, 2009 9:45 AM
Really, people haven't heard of Manifesto?! Man.. that's weird. They had a big design-their-logo contest when they launched!
Posted by: raigan | June 24, 2009 1:38 PM
they were one of the best sites, it's too bad. i think they were a bit ahead of their time; in 10 years indie games may be popular enough to support a site that only sells non-casual indie games, but not yet
Posted by: Paul Eres | June 24, 2009 3:39 PM
btw, to read his statement on closing it down (which is very interesting and which wasn't linked to here) use this link:
http://playthisthing.com/shuttering-manifesto
there's a lot of interesting stuff in that article, worth reading
Posted by: Paul Eres | June 24, 2009 4:14 PM
Never heard of em.
Posted by: Mauro | June 24, 2009 5:08 PM
Oddly but the real problem with Manifesto Games is their (ahem) manifesto.
This manifest contain a lot of claim and promises, mostly unfulfilled where they never tried to solved it.
Manifesto Games can still be fixed but i think the problem is in the directive/management level and not in the "promised" concept. Of course this solution will not happens.
Posted by: magallanes | June 28, 2009 2:08 PM