Information for Developers

The indie game industry should be suported as much as possible, that's why a lot of review sites just ignore the completely free games. I understand this position, but can i rely on Manifesto to distribute my game if i decide to release it for free ?

Jordan:

Not necessarily--we are, after all, a commercial enterprise, and the bulk of our catalog consists of games we either sell, or gain some revenue from as an affiliate.

That being said, we do feature -some- free games, and will continue to add free games over time. We do so as a service to our community, in essence; we want our site to be the first place people turn to when looking for the offbeat and creative, and sometimes the offbeat and creative is not a commercial product. As calculating, evil capitalists with the eyes on the bottom line, in other words, we think it's sometimes worthwhile to point to free content, because we garner good will with our customers by doing so, and therefore get them to come back more often and actually buy stuff.

So, yes, we're happy to offer free games--but only when we think they're really VERY good. In some ways, free games have a higher barrier to surmount, in terms of what we offer, than for-sale games; since we get nothing directly by offering them, we want to make sure they are indeed excellent, and things we're proud to offer.

I hope that makes some kind of sense...

Do you have any charts of sales figures? I'm interested in how well games sold through Manifesto are actually doing.

A Famitsu style top 50, or even top 10, best sellers of the week/month would be fanstastic. X units total. Y units in the last 30 days. Z units in the last 7 days.

-Brendan

Cool page. One question, when a game is published through Manifesto, do you allow the game developer to retain no-manifesto URLs, company names, websites, and promotion of other games, or does all that need to get stripped out before publishing?

The statment "A typical publisher passes on, after retail discounts and MDF, what amounts to ~10% of the consumer dollar. We pass on 60%." is true, but as misleading as interviewing to be a car salesman on the premise that the owner earns a million a year.

A typical publisher:
Fronts most to all of the money for development
Fronts all of the money for publishing
Fronts all of the money for marketing
Assumes most to all of the legal liability
Assumes most to all of the financial risk.

In another words, a publisher is hiring a developer to make a game, owns that game, and rightly deserves the money for the sales of the game they paid for. Each of these points are hugely expensive and important issues. The only one of these points that Manifesto handles is marketing, and even that isn't comparable, because you can't compare a multi-million dollar marketing campaign with retail presence to a website with a newsletter.

How about giving us a better analogy: other portals.

Say a graph, with Manifesto in one column, Reflexive Arcade, etc. in the rest.

On the rows:

What percentage does Manifesto take vs. Reflexive Arcade, etc?
How many unique viewers are on each of these sites?
What relative percentage of exposure does each of these games yet?
What percentage of customers actually purchase on Manifesto vs. these other portals?
What marketing mechanisms does Manifesto provide (or not) compared to the competition, and how effective are these mechanisms?

Information such as this will help developers, such as myself, determine if the cost of self-marketing is less than or greater than the percentage lost to the portal's sales commission.

Hi I'm to new to the Indie Game industy I just developed a new game and I was just wondering how to upload it!

Rakkar:

I don't know what percentage Reflexive takes; I suggest you talk to them. (I do know that our contract is more favorable in some respects--they take credit card fees and bandwidth costs off the top before the split, and we do not; they also have an affiliate program, offering up to 40% of the retail purchase price to affiliates [we sell some games as a Reflexive affiliate], and that also comes off the top before the developer split. We plan an affiliate program (none in place at present), but our contract also assumes that we absorb the cost of this, not sharing that cost with developers.

Reflexive's traffic is much bigger than ours at present--at present, Alexa (an imperfect measure of course) puts us at "reach per million users" of 18; Reflexive scores 254.

Our main marketing support at present, since we are operating on a scant capital basis, is mainly in the realm of publicity--we've achieved some coverage of our games in places like Wired, PC Gamer (UK), and Reuters. We don't do this for all games, however.

Do keep in mind that this isn't an either/or situation, however; both we and Reflexive make non-exclusive deals, meaning it's perfectly possible to contract with both us and them.

Kieran: We don't have an automated uploading system... Contact bill at manifestogames.com.

Hanford:

We do normally take out links to the developer's website from the installer, but that's negotiable--we don't in all cases, and if it's an issue for you, it's not a problem. (Also do note that we include the developer's name, and a link to a developer page that itself links to them, in the game information page.) If there's an in-game link to purchase, we do ask that, if we serve the demo to users, it links to us for purchase--which we think is fair, if we're paying the bandwidth for the download. But we understand and expect that there will be some 'leakage' for those who prefer to buy direct from the developer--that's expected, and just one of the costs we bear by being non-exclusive.

Costik, Thanks for the reply. A bit of clarification here: I was definitely referring to URLs in the full game, and not the demo. I would completely expect to have the "buy" button in the demo link to you guys. That is indeed completely fair.

Patches and updates.

I noticed that you have JA2 for sale. I remember this game being great but bugged. How would we go about getting up to date patches for these and similar games. Is it a service that will be provided by yourselves (a link to a site containg a recent patch at the bare minimum), or will we have to root them out ourselves?

lol, the answer to this question will then influence whether to purchase JA2, as Steam has had the highly bugged JA2 gold on sale for over 6 months and have done bugger all to rectify it's bugged status and lack of content that is supposed to be shipped with JA2 Gold. I'm not a big fan of Steam btw :D

Yar, well.... You know, the developer of JA2 has been out of business for years. We have the most recent version, which I believe has been patched as far as it goes, but if there are still bugs, well... I don't think there's anyone around to fix them further. I actually didn't have a lot of problems with the game when I played it, albeit that was some years ago...

Just wondering, after emailing bill at manifestogames.com ... how soon can one typically expect a reply?
Do you respond to mails about games you are not interested in or are those just ignored.
With spam filters and stuff email isn't quite as reliable as it once might have been so adding a paragraph stating what to expect there might help.
thanks

I try to reply to everyone that submits games to us, but sometimes get backed up -- we are a small crew wearing multiple hats so it might be lost in my backlog of submissions also. Feel free to ping me again.

Bill

It is very sad that though we've been sending you many letters for weeks now we have not got any answer but a single promise to look through the game. After that there were no answers for a couple of weeks.
It is very sad that there so little respect to developers so no answer could be gained, only being put out.

I really want to know that too - all of my games are released free.

I sent you guys an e-mail about getting a game publishedlast week. Not to sound impatient, but I was wondering if you guys got a chance to look at it yet? We actially have a better demo now (Some graphical changes and the addition of two new levels, in place of the very buggy last one we have now) Looking forward to hearing from you.

Well, this site seems dead... A shame too, I just got published by GamePro Labs...