Unanswered questions about Manifesto Games
Recently I wrote about how Kongregate is an indie game publisher that is doing some really great things with developer relations. Another publisher, Manifesto Games -- is also doing some things right. They claim that developers get a majority of the profit, and that they want to focus on innovation and not clones. This is great to see more publishers being dev-friendly. I’d like to know a bit about whether or not they let the developers have access to their end customers.
Their Information for Developers page allows for blog-style comments on the bottom. It’s a bit curious, since it’s more of a permanent informational page rather than a blog-style post page or a Q&A forum. But I decided to post a comment to it with a question:
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?
But here is it five days later and Manifesto, nor anyone, has managed to post a reply. In fact there’s another comment on the page from over a month ago that has no public answer. Frankly, that doesn’t look very good. If they’re not going to be able to answer comments posted to that page, they should just disable it. It’s not like comments are expected on a page like that. I think Manifesto shows some promise, but it looks like they need to improve their communications.
You can see the comments I’m talking about at the bottom of their Developer’s page.
UPDATE: A couple weeks after I posted the question, a rep from Manifesto answered my questions, and some others. Check it out.
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January 30th, 2007 at 8:50 pm
Manifesto’s build requirements are minimal—no splash or logos needed, just put their buy links in place of yours and you’re done. You are allowed to keep active links to your own site in the game (a rare privilege, no?). I’m not sure what their policy is on cross promotion of other games, and I don’t believe they will go so far as to share customer details with you.
January 30th, 2007 at 8:57 pm
Thanks Drake. That’s pretty cool. To clarify my comment of “let the developers have access to their end customers”: I don’t actually expect them to give out mailing lists to developers, or otherwise actually assist in developer/user communication. My only real hope is that they allow the developer to establish that relationship with the end user, if the developer wants.
Examples might be: an in-game “sign up for the Monolux newsletter” option, or a “take the Monolux customer survey!” type link. With the publishers I’ve published for, my game was not allowed to make that kind of contact.
Sounds like Manifesto does, and that’s pretty cool.