Manifold - Open Game Distribution

What if every creator had a game store and earned from sales? What if buying from any store meant a single, unified library? What if niche stores found your players instead of Steam burying your game? That's Manifold: manifoldpowered.com Empowering communities to own their game distribution.

For builders and coders: Checkout the latest article from my newsletter Stop Mocking S3: How To Truly do S3 Integration Tests Locally for $0 linkedin.com/pulse/stop-moc… via @LinkedIn #sotwareengineering #testdrivendevelopment #tdd

Game devs, how does having a demo impact your wishlist count (except for Next Fest numbers)?

@foxgamelab Awesome animation!

Some Dissolve Effect final touch #gamedev #indiedev #roguelike #unity #shader

Do you think that someday any other platform's wishlist system will be as important as Steam's?

Other player-focused features developed were: - Game listings and search by name, tag, genre, etc. - Wishlist system (although we won’t be using it. 😅 We will focus on Steam wishlists as they are much more valuable at this time) - Game purchases and downloads - Review system (will your game become Overwhelmingly Positive?) This week we will start the frontend, creating pages and ensuring anyone can redeem and download the free demos available.

The Open Source Steam project weekly report Last week was so full of work that I couldn’t even find time to write posts about it. Basically, the API covering all MVP use cases is complete! Among the accomplishments: - User signup and sign-in - Game registration - Game files management with @Cloudflare R2 storage (same as @itchio) This month we will release the first couple of stores using this system (demo-only stores). If you wish to have your game demo featured to get wishlists, tell me more about it below! 👇 #indiedev #gamedev #opensource

@BeanJuiceStudio Sound effects

Game dev question of the day What's the one part of making games that devs typically don't put enough time into?

Building games teaches you a hard truth: what you dream of building isn’t always what your players actually want. We just hit this wall with Manifold’s first store. Our own wishlist system sounded perfect on paper, but right now it adds little to no value to users. So instead of forcing it, we decided to keep the honest redirect to Steam while we quietly turn our wishlist into something truly worth using. Sometimes the best move is knowing when to pause your vision and listen to reality. What about you? Ever had to kill or postpone a “cool” feature because players didn’t care? #indiedev #gamedev #softwaredevelopment #gaming

@nuntiusgames Uma pena que não vou conseguir ir esse ano! Mas queria apresentar meu projeto pra vocês, será que podemos nos falar no seu discord?

A NUNTIUS VAI ESTAR NA GAMESCOM LATAM 2026 🇧🇷🔥 Se você for colar por lá, passa nos estandes e vem apoiar os nossos estúdios! Tem muita coisa braba sendo mostrada 👇

@KiraniPiebox 10%+ Conversion rate is pretty good! Parabéns!

I got more than a 100 copies sold of my first game! 🥳 It is a small number compared to successful indie games but I read that you get around 10% of your wishlists. I released with 730 and was expecting to sell 73 copies. Getting more than that 10% is actually pretty awesome.

Yes, that’s one of the goals. The main one, though, is to be what Godot is to game engines: an open source solution for game distribution. This means any content creator will be able to create their own stores and sell games previously submitted to the Manifold platform. Even though there will be many stores, all the games from a given user will be on a single library. This means you could have your own store, sell the games you want to your audience, and earn a percentage of the revenue.

@ManifoldPowered Oh! i didnt realize you had your own platform. If there's good games on there, and opportunity to interact with the devs during playtesting and stuff i'd be down.

If content creators could earn revenue for each game bought on Steam (referral system), do you think more games would be marketed and discovered, or would nothing change? #indiedev #gamedev

@ExplodinBeef Any game from the store purchased from your link would be eligible

@ManifoldPowered You skipped over my question. Would those games be literally any game? Or just specifics?

@ExplodinBeef The idea is that any game purchased through your link could generate revenue for you. Would that incentivize you to experiment and showcase more games to your audience?

@ManifoldPowered But those games would be from a list of specific games right? Not just Any game i play?

@ExplodinBeef The idea is not that you would receive money to play a game, but that every time someone buys a game because of you, you could earn a commission

@ManifoldPowered People already buy the games I play, if I was getting paid to play specific games Im not sure how that'd work out.

Just shipped the foundation of our game registry! With that, developers will be able to register their titles. All games start in "Private" mode, giving creators total control before going live. Building the future, one byte at a time. 🛠️ #buildinpublic #devlog #gamedistribution

@RinoTheBouncer Voyage Century A 20 years old MMORPG set in the Age of Sail where you can be anything from Royal Military Officer to Caribean Pirate

Let’s go!🚀

That's some really good advice. To help solve the discoverability issue, I'm creating an infrastructure where any community can create its own game store and spotlight games from its niche. I'm starting with a free/demos-only store as an MVP. Could you give me some feedback on whether that would make sense for your Capyvarias or future games? Obs: Feito no Brasil também 🇧🇷

Yesterday I got my 1st viral post on x and many of you asked about how I got my wishlists on that post. Here's the break down 👇 Most of my wishlists came from Steam events: - 2 by Steam (Animal Fest, Steam Next Fest) - 2 by others (Made in Brazil, Women in Games) 🧶 1/3