Announcing Play This Thing!

We just launched a new site, which we invite you to check out. It's called Play This Thing, and it will feature one cool game each day--free games, interactive fiction, mods, and weird stuff like alternative reality and "big urban" games, as well, of course, as independent games.

Why are we doing this, and why is it separate from the Manifesto site?

For a bunch of reasons.

For one thing, when we launched the Manifesto site, we expected it to be a content-and-community site as well as an online retailer. That hasn't turned out as well as we had hoped; "The Word," our pages with reviews and articles about games, never got a lot of traffic--and in any event, reviews there sat a little uneasily on a site that was trying to sell you stuff. It was also not updated frequently enough to draw much repeat traffic--and perhaps was too much inspired by print magazine reviews. Online, where a demo download is a click away, short squibs are perhaps more useful than lengthy reviews--quick reading, and enough to give you a sense of whether it's worth your time to check the game out.

For another, we wanted to celebrate the full range of creativity in games outside the mainstream, including games that we ourselves don't necessarily sell--free games, games from people who haven't signed up to sell here, and so on. Play This Thing lets us do that, without confusing the Manifesto Games mission unduly. Of the five games on the front page at launch, for instance, only two are ones we sell.

When Play This Thing features a game that Manifesto sells, we'll link back here for purchase, of course--but we'll be covering a lot of games we don't sell, too. In essence, we're divvying up responsibilities: Manifesto Games becomes an ecommerce site, while Play This Thing takes care of content and community.

You'll note some changes here; the top menu link to The Word has become one to Play This Thing, and the area on the front page that used to contain the first few paragraphs of the most recent article from The Word is gone (and thank goodness--it's been a long time since we updated The Word, partly because we've been working on getting up Play This Thing, and it was getting pretty stale). And over time, most of our pages devoted to free games will be coming down, since Play This Thing will be a more logical place to feature them. (They never sat comfortably here, in any event.) And while we'll be maintaining the forums here, they'll be simplified a bit.

You'll notice some interesting features on Play This Thing, some of which we'll be integrating back into the Manifesto Games site in future. Play This Thing allows you to rate all games without having to post a review (once logged on)--and also provides Firefly-like recommendations of games you might like, based on how you and others have rated games. It also has an RSS feed for the front page, so you can easily get the new posts there by subscribing.

Hope you like it.