For my first real entry- the Dark Spire review having been an edited repost- I wish I had better news. Alas, this will be yet another post full of sadness.

Greg Costikyan’s Manifesto Games has been mentioned a handful of times on this blog. It opened in 2006 as a digital-distribution channel for independent games. It offered independent game developers a unified service through which to sell their wares, avoiding both the difficulty of selling through a physical, brick-and-mortar distributor and the hassle of developing a ‘store’ and payment system on their own. It was also intended as a single interface for gamers to by games through- sparing them both the trouble of using one custom-built store out of hundreds and the worry as to whether a given developer was legit or not. In addition, Manifesto offered digital distribution for some older games- Jagged Alliance 2 was available there long after there was no way to obtain it from normal retailers.

Unfortunately, it was not to be- early in June of this year, Manifesto Games closed its doors.

I think the big issue that Manifesto had was one of support- it never seemed like they quite got the critical mass of support from developers that they needed. Certain genres were always better-represented than others; while there was a decent selection of point-and-click adventures, I never found any shooters on the service that I really liked. More than once, I’d see this-or-that game mentioned in Manifesto’s forums only wait for it to appear and find that it never actually materialized on the service. Manifesto never seemed to capture any support from the Japanese doujin scene; I consider this to be a big loss for the company, as that could have proven to be a trojan niche. Most of the “big-name” indie games- as much as such things can exist- seemed to avoid Manifesto, for reasons that weren’t entirely clear to me.

The good news is that other services have stepped up and seem to be succeeding where Manifesto failed; Steam and Stardock’s similar Impuse service have both captured a reasonable selection of indie games in addition to their big-name products. Even PSN and XBLA seem to be doing the same to some extent. Good Old Games provides a similar digital-download service specializing on older games; their catalog contains a lot of big-name titles and is steadily growing. New challenger Rockin’ Android seems to be making a go of releasing translated doujin games as well (although their release dates all seem to have slipped a little, which is somewhat worrisome).

Still, I’m going to miss Manifesto- it’s a shame to see it go, and I think the indie game community is poorer for having lost it.

Man, that was depressing. I promise next time I’ll yammer about Touhou or something.

- HC

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 15th, 2009 at 6:55 am and is filed under video games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.