Welcome Comrade!

The machinery of gaming has run amok.

It is time for revolution.

So begins The Scratchware Manifesto, which our CEO, Greg Costikyan, had a hand in writing (as "Designer X") back in 1999.

We agree. A specter is haunting gaming: the specter of mediocrity and decline.

An industry that was once the most innovative and exciting artistic field on the planet has become a morass of drudgery and imitation. A field that once prized creativity and novelty has become so risk averse that it will fund only franchise titles and licensed drivel; a medium that once spun off whole new genres practically every year has instead become one in which only games that slot into accepted marketing categories can be published.

Manifesto Games aims to change that.

The problem is three-fold: it is driven by Moore's Law, the narrowness of the retail channel, and publisher cowardice.

Moore's Wall

Moore's Law means that computers get more and more powerful every year, and as they do, they can push more and more polygons, displaying better and better graphics. That's great--except that once it becomes possible to display better graphics, it becomes mandatory. If you a want to release a game in a popular genre, you have to match the graphic capabilities of competing games published in the same year. More polygons means more time devoted to the creation of art assets--and that means higher development costs. Back in the day, it took a couple of man days to create a Doom level. Creating a Doom III level took multiple man-weeks. Thus budgets spiral every upward; as late as 1992, a typical computer game had a budget of $200,000. Today, $10m is your bare buy-in for a next generation title.

As budgets soar, publishers are increasingly conservative about what they will fund, because nobody wants to lose $10m. So they look for ways to reduce their risk. Today, they have become so risk-averse that anything other than a franchise title, a game based on a movie license, or a game that slots easily into a category they know how to sell is unthinkable.

Today, Myst, Civilization, or Sim City would never get funded.

We're condemned to more of the same-old same-old from now for all eternity--unless we figure out a way to break this iron grip--what Raph Koster calls "Moore's Wall.'

We think it's possible--by building for the game industry what the independent film and independent music movements do for their own industry. Creating a viable "independent games" movement, where people can experiment, at lower budgets and with less risk, on quirky, offbeat, innovative games--and find an audience that prizes gameplay over glitz, innovation over graphical trickery, playfulness over polygons.

Manifesto's mission is to build a viable channel for independently-created games.

The Narrowness of the Retail Channel

A typical game store has fewer than 200 facings. Yet thousands of titles are released each year. The result is that a game has two weeks or less to establish itself--and if it isn't selling through in that short time-frame, it's into the bargain bin to make room for the next title.

The result: highly hyped mediocre games win out over stealth masterpieces. There is no time for word-of-mouth to do its magic, no way to build a groundswell of enthusiasm for a fine new game.

And as a result (also of the high budgets required for A-level titles), the conventional channel is no longer interested in any game that can't project a bare minimum of 300,000 unit sales. There is no room for games with niche appeal--or even for games in genres that still have a following, but cannot generate those kinds of sales. Computer wargames, graphic adventures, flight sims, turn-based fantasy, 4X--they're all gradually disappearing from the shelves.

We say the hell with this. Broadband is spreading. Shelfspace is not an issue on the Internet. Let's move online--and let's offer as many titles, of as many different types, as we can. Let's appeal to every niche we can find, and let's make it possible for someone who controls his budget, and knows he can sell 10,000 copies, to make a decent living doing so.

Chris Anderson of Wired talks about the long tail, the many niche products that can collectively generate revenues comparable to those of the hits. Gaming has no long tail. The retailers are only interested in hits.

That too, is our mission: To create a long tail for games, to allow a thousand different games to find their audience, to smash the iron logic that prohibits innovation.

Publisher Cowardice

The large publishers' desperate quest to reduce risk paradoxically makes it harder for them to find the best-sellers they need. Historically, it has often been the games that create new game styles, that innovate in fundamental ways, that become big sellers and establish new franchises: Ultima, Civilization, SimCity, Doom, Command & Conquer, Ultima Online, The Sims... Sometimes, to be sure, it isn't until the second or third try that someone really nails the concept; Wolfenstein 3D preceded Doom, Dune II preceded Command & Conquer... But today, you never get the chance to try once, let al one a second time.

We believe that if we can create a place for people to experiment at lower budgets, and still find an audience, we can enable the creation of new successful genres of broad appeal--just as the creativity of independent music and film reinvigorates their mainstreams when those media become stale.

And that's the third part of our mission: to sustain the enormous ferment of creativity we've seen over the last three decades into the future, even as the mainstream game industry becomes tired and decayed.

Games are Art

Today, most games are developed in massive sweatshops by hundreds of people over three years or more. They are "paint by the numbers" projects, aimed at minor and incremental improvements over previous games with the same essential gameplay. Many publishers even eschew the whole concept of a "game designer," preferring to let control of a project reside in a manager or programmer. We believe that game design is an artform in its own right. To create a compelling, innovative, and interesting game, someone needs to hold the creative vision.

And individual creative vision is inevitably snuffed out in a massive bureaucratic team.

Games are art. Some are bad art, of course, but some are sublime products of the human soul. We strongly believe in small teams who love what they do and risk their livelihoods and their futures on ideas that they need to instantiate and impart to gamers.

But because of the conservatism of the conventional industry, teams like this will never get funded, or achieve conventional retail distribution.

Manifesto Games is committed to helping them find a market.

Creators Should Have an Upside

Let's say you're a developer, and against the odds, you land publisher funding of, say, $10m. Every penny of that funding is recoupable. In other words, you will never see a dime of royalties until the game has sold enough copies to repay your advance.

A typical royalty is 15% of the wholesale price, less an allowance for market development funds (MDFs). In pratice, this works out to 10% (or less) of the consumer dollar. Let's suppose a $40 retail price; this game would need to sell 2 and a half million copies for the advance to earn out.

Good. Luck.

And developers almost never eke out a profit on the basis of their development funding, either: publishers want to ensure that every dollar they spend winds up in assets on the disk, and since they are the sole source of funding and the sole path to market, they have the leverage to ensure that they do.

Even if a game is a modest success and spawns a sequel, the developer has no leverage--because the publishers demand ownership of IP. To get funded, you must sign away the rights to your trademark, your copyright, your world, your own work. The publisher can--and will, if you are obstreperous--simply take the next title in house, or contract with another developer. You build the franchise; they profit.

As a result, developers live a hand-to-mouth existence, scrabbling for the next development contract, and never doing better than keeping their own salaries paid. Developers are the artists, the creators on whose shoulders vision the whole amazing success of the game industry has been built--and they are screwed at every turn.

Manifesto Games believes that is not only wrong, but short sighted. In a healthy market, success should be rewarded.

That's why we pass on not 10% of the consumer dollar--but typically, more like 60%. And that's why we do not demand exclusive ownership of IP, even if and when we provide development funding. Because the developers who work with us are valued partners, not saps to be fleeced. And we profit when they do--not because our lawyers were clever at devising ridiculous contract terms.

Gamers Rule

Every other artform is aristocratic. The Great Artist creates, the passive audience consumes. Books, film, TV, even music are all peculiarly antiquated media in this democratic age.

A game does not exist without players. Developers shape the experience, but gamers instantiate it. And the choices and actions of the player influence the experience. Games engage, they do not unfurl. And in the best games, gamers will find ways of using the game in ways that the creators never anticipated--and the best creators love that they do.

Yet the conventional industry persists in marketing in the same old, old media ways--broadcast advertising to a passive audience they presume is dumb.

We believe that gamers are smart. We believe that gamers, given the tools to find the kinds of games they like, will make intelligent decisions. We believe that gamers are not only willing to but enthusiastic about spending money on games they love.

We rely on gamers. We rely on them to provide player reviews, to make our ranking system something worthwhile, to provide the data that allows us to make intelligent recommendations to them. We engage with them on our forums, we encourage them to speak up, we view them as active participants in our efforts--and our own best advocates.

That's why we're perfectly happy when someone posts a negative review. That's why we have an affiliate program. That's why our management blogs frequently about what we're doing.

Because we are gamers, and we believe that connection and communication among all people in the value chain, from players to developers, and us in between, is essential to fostering the sort of innovation and creativity we love in games.

For Manifesto Games, "community" is not a Web 2.0 buzzword. Community is what we live and die on. Building a community of enthusiasts for the kind of product the conventional industry will never publish is what we're about. Fostering and being part of that community is core to our future.

And why shouldn't it be?

Don't we all love games?

Join the Revolution

Join us, and help build a better tomorrow. Get the word out that there's more to games than you'll find at Best Buy, and that Manifesto Games is the place to find the best of the rest, the products of individual vision, games created for love and not at the behest of some blinkered suit whose last job was selling Tide.

Let a thousand flowers blossom; let a thousand different games contend.

From now on, we must all strive resolutely to bring about the overthrow of the existing order.

Gameplay over glitz.

For more about the ideas behind Manifesto Games, try these links:

• The Scratchware Manifesto
  
• "Death to the Games Industry: Long Live Games"
      (and part 2)
  
• The Cluetrain Manifesto
  
• The Long Tail