Being an indie developer is hard. Not because it’s hard to create amazing games but because it’s hard to get your game in front of the right buyers. There are a lot of games released each month and as more and more people want to develop games that number continues to increase. Platforms like Steam don’t do the greatest job of highlighting the diamonds in the rough of bad games, but I assure you they’re out there.
After about five years of creating indie games a company named Kermdinger decided to change their business plan and launched a new game platform: Jump. Currently it’s in beta phase and you can try it now on their website. The goal of Jump is to provide a high curated list of indie games to it’s subscribers and only adding about 10-15 new games a month. It’s uncertain how long a game will remain playable on the platform but the goal is to highlight new games each month and give them spotlight on their main page. Because this will be a subscription model once you sign up you have unlimited access to all games available on their platform. As for the games, you can play them immediately. There is no need to download the games, they are available right there on your web browser. I think this is a great feature because you can play games anywhere, on any computer, anytime.
How do they get developers in on the action? Developers will be paid by the amount of time users play their games compared to all other games played on the system. Jump will use 70% of net revenue as the pool of money in which they pay the developers. They also say the key for developers is to submit their games for Jump a few months after their initial launch, a good time after they’ve made their premium sales. This seems like a good thing for developers and a good thing subscribers. If you really wanted to play a game when it was released you would have bought it, that is if you even knew it existed.
I think this service will be good for the developers and for the gamers who subscribe to it. Subscribers will get some of the best indie games out there and developers get a new stream of revenue, it’s win win. The one thing I’m not sure about is the subscription price. I do have faith that Jump will price it reasonably though. Good luck Jump, I hope to write about your success in the years to come!
