Building a community was supposed to be critical to Manifesto's growth, but from the beginning it wasn't clear how that would be accomplished. Solomon noticed this when he joined the company in mid-2007. After launch, competitors such as browser game hub Kongregate built better followings. There, users earned achievements, chatted while playing and "tipped" developers for their efforts. Manifesto wanted to relaunch with more social media features like Kongregate's, but doing so would require considerable resources.
Redesigning Manifesto Games couldn't be accomplished with the site's revenue alone because there simply wasn't enough of it, and Solomon says Manifesto couldn't get outside financial backing either. In March 2008, VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi reported that Manifesto was seeking roughly $3 million in venture capital, calling the effort "a long shot."
Eventually, it became clear to Solomon that Manifesto would have trouble getting out of its rut. He's not sure exactly when Costikyan decided to kill the site, but says it's been running on "low effort and low returns" for the last few months. Solomon is working with Costikyan on other projects now, but another Manifesto isn't among them.
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If there's a lesson to be gleaned from Manifesto's downfall, it might be that indie games will never have the same marketing muscle as AAA titles. Smaller games mean smaller budgets and less money for advertising. Press and viral buzz can work, but only if the stars align behind a particular idea. The real trick to promoting indie games, I think, isn't in more marketing, but in selling something else.
Look at all the portals that are successful. There's Steam, Direct2Drive, GamersGate, Xbox Live, WiiWare and the PlayStation Network, and all of them sell something besides indie games, whether its big-budget titles, casual games or in-house projects. Costikyan once told me that Manifesto would utilize the "long tail," a business model coined by Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson that asserts businesses can reap significant profits from selling small volumes of a wide variety of niche products. But Costikyan's interpretation - that a site could thrive off niche markets alone - misinterprets the idea.
To successfully tap into the long tail, distributors need to offer both the high-volume hits and a wide selection of obscurities. Manifesto offered neither. It didn't have the funds or the desire to sell AAA titles, and it never secured a big enough library of indie games to become the definitive source of those titles. And because Manifesto Games didn't fund any game development projects or host any exclusives, there was little reason to buy from the site except sympathy for the cause.
That's not to say the idea didn't have merit. Speaking with Gilbert, his conflict becomes clear. PlayFirst pays him well to design point-and-click adventures for a casual audience. Periodically, he mulls a sequel to The Shivah, but it's just not feasible. The portals he sells through want to avoid religion, and to successfully launch through Steam or similar outlets he'd have to spend time and effort on marketing. No distributor but Manifesto would champion Gilbert's work as a pillar of independent thinking.
Which means, at the moment, none will. In Greg Costikyan's terms, we may be well and truly fucked.
Jared Newman is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer. He last covered indie doom and gloom for The Escapist in "The Short Shelf Life of EGP Apparel."
