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. Manifesto Games to Fuel Indie Development Log in/Create an Account | Top | 6 comments | Search Discussion Display Options Threshold: -1: 6 comments 0: 6 comments 1: 5 comments 2: 5 comments 3: 3 comments 4: 1 comments 5: 0 comments Flat Nested No Comments Threaded Oldest First Newest First Highest Scores First Oldest First (Ignore Threads) Newest First (Ignore Threads) The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way. Downloading... (Score:2, Insightful) by Azraael (813863) on Wednesday September 28, @05:02PM (#13670250) I wonder how long their company is going to last if people can just download the games and freely distribute them on, say, bittorrent... [ Reply to ThisRe:Downloading... by MiceHead (Score:3)Wednesday September 28, @05:16PMRe:Downloading... by Azraael (Score:2)Wednesday September 28, @05:31PM Good Luck. (Score:3, Insightful) by liloldme (593606) on Wednesday September 28, @05:22PM (#13670460) 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 ;-) [ Reply to This I Declare This Pizza to be Awesome (Score:4, Informative) by MiceHead (723398) on Wednesday September 28, @05:57PM (#13670784) Manifesto Games might (or might not) be great in and of itself -- that's for Messrs. Costikyan and Wilson and the general game-buying public to decide. What I like about this is that we're seeing some smart guys pouring their sweat and money into "indie publishers" (such as Manifesto and Garage Games). And, so, it seems that some smart guys think that there's going to be a boom in the independent games market.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.______________www.dejobaan.com - Dejobaan Games [ Reply to This1 reply beneath your current threshold.