Manifesto Games to Fuel Indie Development 6
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.
Downloading... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Downloading... (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:Downloading... (Score:2, Informative)
Good Luck. (Score:3, Insightful)
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
I Declare This Pizza to be Awesome (Score:4, Informative)
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