Indy label for games

[The Grim Squeaker]

Game industry veterans Greg Costikyan and Johnny Wilson announced today that they are joining forces to launch Manifesto Games, a new venture to build a strong and viable independent game industry.
Its site will offer independently-developed games for sale via direct download--a single place where fans of offbeat and niche games can find "the best of the rest," the games that the retail channel doesn't think worth carrying.
Three types of games will be offered: truly independent, original content from creators without publisher funding; the best PC games from smaller PC game publishers, including games in existing genres like wargames, flight sims, and graphic adventures; and niche MMOs.

While games were once the domain of hobbyists, today, the game industry considers any title that sells fewer than 1 million copies to be a failure; "The typical game store only has 200 facings," notes Costikyan, Manifesto’s CEO.,
"They can only carry best-sellers. On the Internet, there is no shelf space and you are limited only by how well you can market yourself, your site. This is where niche product can rule.
" Manifesto believes that an independent game market is analogous to film or music, where less commercial offerings aimed at identifiable markets and produced at lower budgets than the "blockbusters" can achieve profitability and critical success.

"The game industry has become moribund,” notes Costikyan. "Because of ballooning budgets and the narrowness of the retail channel, it is now essentially impossible for anything other than a franchise title or licensed product to obtain distribution.
Yet historically, the major hits, the titles that have expanded the industry to new markets and created new audiences have been highly innovative. It is time for us to find a way to foster innovation, because it's not going to happen if we leave it to the large publishers."

"Many companies are entering the direct download space," Costikyan continues, "but in most cases, they're either focusing on casual downloadable games, or on offering the back catalog of major publishers.
It’s amazing that casual game publishers can succeed selling games to people who, historically, haven't bought them, but we’d rather try to sell games to people who already buy them.
By offering greater exposure to independent games, we'll be introducing gamers to a universe of games they haven't already seen--and that, we think, is the winning strategy."

Interesting, I was wondering when someone finally did this, I hope he gets a good amount of indies behind him, this really has potential if they can make a steam for indies (Although it would still have to contend with Steams problems, maybe they could use Bittorrent? or even Avalanche if it's free for use when it will be released)
manifesto

[brianeyci]

If the pricing is good (< $30 USD), and the quality is good, then I'd be willing to buy. Too bad that as games grow more complex, the human side of programming never changes. You will still need to proofread thousands on thousands of lines of code, maybe tens of thousands, maybe millions, for bugs. Gone are the days when one man can make a game, at least a competitive title with high end graphics, when code is so massive that it takes a team of developers to complete it in any reasonable amount of time.

In the end though I probaby wouldn't give it a second look. I need good graphics, except for free online games. I imagine the average gamer is far less patient than I.

Might work for niche titles though, although I don't know what they mean by niche other than maybe wargaming (maybe a sign that what they are talking about is true, niche games truly don't exist anymore).

Brian

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

There are some developers who say they can break even after selling only 15,000 copies. A solid game with pleasing but behind-the-curve graphics should be able to sell at least that.

[Uraniun235]

If the pricing is good (< $30 USD), and the quality is good, then I'd be willing to buy. Too bad that as games grow more complex, the human side of programming never changes. You will still need to proofread thousands on thousands of lines of code, maybe tens of thousands, maybe millions, for bugs. Gone are the days when one man can make a game, at least a competitive title with high end graphics, when code is so massive that it takes a team of developers to complete it in any reasonable amount of time.

Depends on the game; what can really be killer in today's high-resolution world is the need for artwork to fill in the world. A lot of the coding can be skipped by using someone else's game engine; for example, the Quake engines have been open-sourced, and while Quake 3 is starting to get a bit old, it's a very powerful engine to be had for the grand price of free.

I would imagine that with the engine out of the way, one dedicated person could probably plow through the rest of the code; but that still leaves the object modelling and texturing, which (depending on the size of the project) could consume the efforts of a whole team of artists for quite some time.

As for fun, niche games, good examples of those can be found with N and Soldat. N was done mainly by two guys, and Soldat - with the exception of the music - was all done by one guy. And they're even free!

The big, huge, feature releases with millions of dollars behind them will continue to grow more complex to play and create because growing complexity is making them money. But there will always be an audience, if not a huge one, for simpler games.

[Drooling Iguana]

So clearly what we need to do is set up a repository of royalty-free 3D meshes, textures and other assets to be used in low-budget games.