After almost four years since its announcement, Greg Costikyan’s Manifesto Games is no more. The online independent games store, which was conceptualized by Costikyan following a particularly heated rant of his at GDC, aimed to provide a distribution channel for indies that was free of the typical publisher/developer bullcrap. (See: The Manifesto Manifesto)
We’ve been generally very critical of Manifesto Games on TIGSource since it went live. Greg’s heart was totally in the right place (and his words most definitely appreciated), but the implementation of his vision was subpar, in my opinion. Ultimately, the site’s selection of games did not reflect its manifesto, and it did not provide what news sites and developers themselves couldn’t do better.
These days there are a variety of distribution channels that take independent games seriously and treat them professionally – Steam, Greenhouse, GamersGate, Direct2Drive, etc. Indie games also receive a lot of promotion from The Independent Games Festival and Summits, which are now mainstays of the Game Developer’s Conference. Some of the developers are making big money from console publishers like Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony, too. (Castle Crashers just reached 1,000,000 players on XBLA!)
And for free games, artsy games, and general indie game news and criticism, you can’t beat TIGS, IndieGames.com, Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Destructoid, and Bytejacker. We’re even hitting the gallery scene thanks to guys like messhof and ArtXGame. Not to mention all the popular forums that are indie-curious. And hell, even Kotaku gets a few INDIE EXCLUSIVES every now and then!
Some of this is touched upon in Costik’s farewell post, although I feel like his outlook is, perhaps unsurprisingly, more gloomy and cautionary than it should be. Things are good right now. They can always be better, but… generally, I think the concept that Costik laid out in 2005 (that we ALL laid out in 2005), has been realized, if not by Manifesto specifically, then by the entire community.