Manifesto Games

» see manifestogames.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Manifesto Games was an argument about the American games industry, aimed at people already standing inside it. From Turkey in 2005 the argument was invisible and so was the store, which needed a credit card and a willingness to buy software as a download at a moment when neither was normal here. What we had instead was the pirated shelf, and the pirated shelf carried whatever the mass market carried. The independent stuff was not on it, because nobody was copying it.

The name is not decoration. Greg Costikyan had co-written the Scratchware Manifesto in 2000 and given a talk called Death to the Games Industry in 2005, both of which said roughly the same thing: budgets had grown to the point where no publisher could afford a game that might not sell, so nobody made one. Costikyan then did the awkward thing and tried to build the alternative distribution channel instead of just describing its absence.

The company was announced on 29 September 2005 and founded that October in New York, with Johnny Wilson, formerly the editor of Computer Gaming World, as co-founder. It was a store for downloadable PC games by independent developers, sold to people who bought a dozen or more games a year and would go looking for something odd.

By September 2006 it had deals for about a hundred titles. It carried Super Columbine Massacre RPG when that game was radioactive enough that no other retailer would go near it, which tells you the curation was a real editorial position rather than a filter for whatever cleared legal. On 23 June 2009 Costikyan announced the closure.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the argument ~

The business case was the long tail as it was understood in 2006. Retail shelf space was finite, so a physical store had to move a title in six weeks or send it back, which meant the only games worth publishing were the ones that could open big. A download store has no shelf, so a game selling four hundred copies a year forever is a perfectly good asset. Costikyan's phrasing was that someone will like this game, and the question is how to position it so the people who will like it can find it.

That half of the thesis turned out to be entirely correct, which is why it is worth saying that the store still failed. Finding the audience for a strange game is a marketing problem and marketing costs money, and a curated store with a hundred titles has to fund that discovery work out of margin on a hundred small sales. Steam solved the same problem later by being the place people already had open.

~ what it became ~

Manifesto Games spun out a review site in September 2007 called Play This Thing, with a review a day from critics including Costikyan and Emily Short, covering independent games alongside interactive fiction and mods. That was the discovery layer the store needed, and it outlived the store by five years before closing in 2014.

Everything the company argued for arrived within about three years of it closing. The 2008 Independent Games Festival crowd went on to Braid and World of Goo and Minecraft, Steam opened its doors properly to small developers, the Humble Bundle started in 2010 and itch.io in 2013. Being early is not the same as being wrong, but from the inside of a company running out of runway in the middle of a financial crisis the two are indistinguishable.

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