Manifesto Games to establish new direct-download portal
Veteran game designer Greg Costikyan, known for strongly criticising the financial models of the games industry, has left his current job to found Manifesto Games, a new venture that has the goal to "build a strong and viable independent game industry".
Graphic adventure are specifically mentioned in the press release as a genre of particular interest to Manifesto Games, along with wargames, flight sims and niche MMOs.
"It's time to put my money where my mouth is," Costikyan said on his blog. He most recently wrote a feature called Death to the Game Industry, Long Live Games for online mag The Escapist.
Explaining the reasons behind founding Manifesto Games: "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."
Although a number of direct-download and episodic experiments have been launched as of late, few initiatives have been taken to create one-stop destinations for such games. Manifesto expects to begin carrying original content by early 2006.
More information can be found on Manifesto's makeshift website, or Greg Costikyan's blog.
You might also want to know about
__medium.jpeg)
