A new on-demand, subscription-based video game service called Jump is preparing to launch, offering an initial library of 60 to 100 indie games playable for a flat monthly fee of $9.99 per month. After a closed beta period, running between now and July 24 with a sample library of 10 to 20 games, the full service will offer unlimited, ad-free playtime for its “highly curated” library, with about 10 new games added each month for Windows, Mac, Linux, HTC Vive, and Oculus Rift.
Jump includes all the standard features of a Netflix or Spotify-style service, including a way to browse recently added games, recently updated games, games with new content, and sort games by genre. Leaderboards, achievements, cloud saves, matchmaking, and multiplayer are all handled through a third-party service called PlayFab, which would most notably allow your saves to carry over onto new devices.
Unlike most on-demand gaming services, which suffer from poor latency due to their reliance on cloud streaming technology, Jump uses a web-based technology that allows them to launch games directly in the Jump client. That way, games don’t need to fully install on a user’s hard drive, and instead run locally by only pulling the assets they need.
The concept of a “Netflix for games” has been a controversial subject among independent game developers in the past, but Anthony Palma, CEO, and Cade Peterson, VP of Communications and Events, believe they’ve found a way to make it work for both gamers and game developers by focusing on discoverability and providing a new source of revenue for games that have worn out their premium sales.
“We want this to be the logical next step in the life cycle of content,” Palma explains in an interview with IGN. “If you think about the parallel to the movie industry, a movie goes on premium sales through theaters and when those sales start to dip off, they look at other avenues and eventually end up at a subscription service, like HBO or Netflix or wherever. That doesn’t exist in gaming right now, and particularly not for indies.”
According to Palma, the exact time that Jump chooses to bring an indie game over to its service is important.
“We work with developers specifically to make sure they’re bringing their game to us in the right time in their life cycle. We want them to run their premium sale cycle on Steam or Xbox or wherever, and once those sales dip off to a certain point, then it’s a better time to bring it over to us.”
The primary concern with subscription-based gaming services on the development side is that such a model will devalue games in an ecosystem that has already been doing so for years, with cheap game bundles and big sales on platforms like Steam being the primary way many gamers purchase indie games. Some game developers, like Will O’Neill, creator of Little Red Lie, blame this on something even larger.
“The internet itself has irreparably harmed the value of creative content, and consumer expectations for what they should pay for entertainment has been lowered in general,” O’Neill tells me. “Services like Netflix and Spotify have echoed out beyond their respective mediums. Things like bundles and sales are just symptoms of that fact. But the fact that a service like Jump intends to be indie-focused does suggest that they have a handle on our market being in a greater state of readiness for that kind of service.”
Ty Taylor, another game developer whose 2013 puzzle platformer The Bridge will be among Jump's offerings, believes the advent of a "Netflix for gaming" has been inevitable.
"Games are going to need to adapt to on-demand streaming services in order to survive," Taylor tells me. "Sure, as someone who makes their livelihood entirely off of sales of the games I create, I'd prefer people play full retail price for a game rather than just playing it for a bit on a pay-per-month service, but the reality is that there are too many games releasing to the market every day for that to be the only sustainable business model anymore."
According to Palma, the team at Jump understands how difficult it is to make money from indie games. Palma started out as an indie game developer himself.
“We don’t want to cannibalize any premium sales,” Palma tells me. “Our goal is to extend revenue for them, not take away from it.”
Revenue is added up according to playtime for an individual game, which Palma estimates to be about 25 to 50 cents per one hour of playtime per user.
“We just take 70% of the full revenue and we pay that to developers based on the amount of time that their game got played, over all the total minutes of gameplay,” explains Peterson, who also brings up the issue of Steam refunds and “gray market” Steam keys sold on third-party sites costing developers money. “[With Jump], there's no potential scenario where a user could play for two hours and then refund it. The developer gets paid no matter what.”
Discoverability is also a huge issue when it comes to indie games. So many games are released on Steam, itch.io, and other platforms every day that it becomes difficult for gamers to find good things to play, and difficult for game developers to gain visibility and popularity. A game can receive critical acclaim from players and large gaming outlets and still not make a ton of money.
“Because we’re doing a very curated catalogue, each of the games will get enough of their time in the sun to earn money,” says Peterson. “This adds a whole new stream of revenue [developers] wouldn’t have gotten before, because a lot of the games will be able to earn money from customers who either passed on buying it in the first place or have never heard of it.”
Taylor expresses a similar sentiment when describing his decision to bring The Bridge over to Jump: "The Bridge is over four years old, and platforms like Jump help to breathe new life into the game and bring it to a new audience that may not have seen the game before. Even if that audience isn't going to pay the full retail price for it, we're still going to see some revenue from the time that they played the game, and that's better than the nothing we would have seen from those players otherwise."
O’Neill, who does not have a game on Jump, tells me the success of such a service will all come down to how lucrative it is for game developers.
“I think many indie devs are now at the point where a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” he tells me. “If not more.”
Chloi Rad is an Associate Editor for IGN. Follow her on Twitter at @_chloi.
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