Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Manifesto Games revealed
Greg Costikyan today revealed his new digital distribution venture: Manifesto Games. After spending several years ‘ranting’ through various mediums, Costikyan has quit his comfortable job at Nokia to start up Manifesto with Dr. Johnny L. Wilson, a games journalist, novelist, and believe it or not ordained minister.
Manifesto is already aimed squarely at the indie market. While Steam and to a lesser extent xStream both focus on modern titles instead of back catalogues neither of them are particularly suitable for indie games, which are typically small (little point in using xStream) and single-player (little point in using Steam)*.
Given this I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a web-based portal, perhaps also embedded in a client application like WMP10 music stores or the Browse Games portion of Steam. It is far too early to speculate any further however – we must wait and see how Manifesto pans out.
Which brings us neatly on to the fact that Greg is blogging it all for public consumption. This openness looks set to extend further and define Manifesto’s business ideology, one that will fit very well into both the indie market, not to mention the company’s ensuing anti-corporate stance. Whether this means we will see Manifesto’s portal DRM-less is questionable: not only would such a move arguably prove the company’s ruin should it take off, but also, during his otherwise hard-hitting (perhaps overly hard) GDC speech, DRM was described as ‘solvable’ rather than needing to be ‘blown up’. We’ll see.
Whatever happens to Manifesto over the course of the year, there is no doubt that it is worth keeping an eye on, and a welcome third player into the progressive DD circle.
*RDKF, although indie, defies both conditions.
Manifesto is already aimed squarely at the indie market. While Steam and to a lesser extent xStream both focus on modern titles instead of back catalogues neither of them are particularly suitable for indie games, which are typically small (little point in using xStream) and single-player (little point in using Steam)*.
Given this I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a web-based portal, perhaps also embedded in a client application like WMP10 music stores or the Browse Games portion of Steam. It is far too early to speculate any further however – we must wait and see how Manifesto pans out.
Which brings us neatly on to the fact that Greg is blogging it all for public consumption. This openness looks set to extend further and define Manifesto’s business ideology, one that will fit very well into both the indie market, not to mention the company’s ensuing anti-corporate stance. Whether this means we will see Manifesto’s portal DRM-less is questionable: not only would such a move arguably prove the company’s ruin should it take off, but also, during his otherwise hard-hitting (perhaps overly hard) GDC speech, DRM was described as ‘solvable’ rather than needing to be ‘blown up’. We’ll see.
Whatever happens to Manifesto over the course of the year, there is no doubt that it is worth keeping an eye on, and a welcome third player into the progressive DD circle.
*RDKF, although indie, defies both conditions.
