Hi, I’m Anthony Palma, founder of Jump, the “Netflix of Indie Games” service that launched on Tuesday. AMA!

How is this better than Steam, where I can get any Indie game I want for a couple of bucks every summer and winter, then have them forever?

What I like to say is that we're not trying to replace Steam or individual purchases by any means - we want to be complementary to Steam, both for gamers and for developers.

One of our main missions is discoverability - developers whose games deserve to be found will be easy to find on Jump, and gamers don't have to sift through all the shovelware on Steam to find quality indie games. We let both sides find each other, and then the business model is very pure as well since we pay out based on play time, so basically I play your game and you make money.

We also wanted the price of Jump to be approachable, so for $9.99/month you get our base library (60+ games), plus roughly 10 new games per month. Even if you only liked 1 of our 10 new games per month, you'd still be paying essentially the same price as 1 indie game on Steam ($9.99) and getting 9 other games you can also poke around in guilt-free (no post-Steam-sale remorse).

developers whose games deserve to be found

What determines this criteria?

We have 3 different things we look for in games:

1. Has it won awards? (IGF, IndieCade, etc.)

2. Is it highly-rated? (7/10 on Steam, Metacritic, etc.)

3. Was it just a runaway hit seller?

All of our games meet at least 1 of these criteria, and most meet 2 or even all 3.

EDIT: I wanted to add here (typed it below but it's buried I think), that we also subjectively screen every game that comes in or that we seek out as well. The 3 points above help us filter out shovelware, but we're also looking at bringing games that might be considered provocative or more art than game. So we're not ONLY using these 3 criteria, it just helps us filter a bit. We're open to check out any game to see if we'd want to bring it to Jump.

<Replying to all the comments here since they're roughly the same>

I'd disagree that these criteria mean a game has been found based on what we've seen. A game can be "overwhelmingly positive" on Steam with an IndieCade and/or IGF award in its pocket and still only have a couple thousand sales. Even brand new games from renowned developers are selling a fraction of the number of copies their previous games have made, and it's just getting so hard for indies to break through the noise on Steam anymore.

Beyond the 3 pillars though, we also subjectively review every game, so we've turned down several games that were "highly rated" on Steam that we felt either gamed that ratings system or just weren't what we were looking for. So of course, we try to be objective, but ultimately we look at them as a group and decide what's right for Jump and what isn't. Curation for us is one objective pass and then one subjective pass.

How about award nomination rather than winning?
Lots of good games may get nominated while only one shall get it for a given edition.

Oh absolutely - IGF and IndieCade "finalists" are winners in our books, that's such a rare feat. Should have clarified, thanks for asking!

Who determines which indie games are "quality" ones?

What happens if a developer offers you a buttload of money to add their game to your service, even if it's not getting positive feedback?

We'll never take a payment FROM a developer to put their game up (nor would anyone do that at this point, haha), and we'll never compromise our quality bar for money. We're here to help indies find more visibility and fans.

See my above comment on what I meant by "quality" too - we have 3 criteria, of which a game must meet at least 1, to be included on Jump.

So does that mean Jump doesn't do brand new releases, only games that have been previously released on another platform?

We work with developers to find the right time to bring their game to Jump. For some, that's a couple years after release (which is cool, I never played Ittle Dew for example when it launched but boy did I want to, just never got around to it). But for others, we've definitely been approached about bringing a game exclusively to Jump or at least as a sim-ship (launching at the same time as other platforms). We just want to make sure it's right for the developers, so we'll certainly have games early in their life cycle or even brand new games if it works for the devs.

The End Is Nigh, for example, only launched 2 months ago.

we have 3 criteria

I'm sorry, I can't find these in your above comments. Would you mind repeating them?

Has it won awards? (IGF, IndieCade, etc.) Is it highly-rated? (7/10 on Steam, Metacritic, etc.) Was it just a runaway hit seller?

Thanks! Sorry, flying through all the questions here!

Where can I find a list of games that you have available? I'm having difficulty locating it on your website.

You can find the entire list of games AND play them for 14 days free if you sign up for a trial! :) We don't ask for a credit card for the trial, so you're free to pop in and check out the whole library risk-free.

I'm confused... do you pay the indie developers to be on your platform or do they have to pay you to be on the platform?

We'll actually pay developers an advance on revenue (case-by-case basis) to help reduce the risk of porting to Jump since we're still new and our business model is relatively new to gaming, too. Once their game is live, 70% of our monthly net revenue is paid out to developers, and it's split up based on how much play time each game gets. We definitely don't charge money to bring your game to the service!

So devs are competing for playtime? How does that work? What prevents a dev from leaving his game on 24/7 to gain playtime?

Im gonna go ahead and assume it would take a lot more resources than its worth to create thousands of fake Jump accounts on thousands of fake computers or virtual consoles to bump up your game on a small, newly founded service.

Exactly what I thought... AFK games like Clicker Heroes have quite a big advantage when it comes to play time, but does it deserve more income?

Or games that have a Client/Server architecture, making people leave the game always open(for exemple Starbound, which I got 200h+ within 3 weeks because I was hosting our small game server), wouldn't it falsely increase a developper's revenue?

We check for all these things and curate the content as well to make sure no one can "game" our payout system. It's against our rules of conduct for developers.

To respond here too, we have some checks in place to see when you're idling, the window doesn't have focus, etc.

We also monitor for alllllll sorts of shady activity, and it's in our contract that we'll kick your game off of Jump if we see such behavior and find out it was you. As mentioned below too, once our user base grows a bit, you'd really have to dedicate some serious resources to this to even make a dent, probably more trouble than it's worth.

What's to stop Smashmouth from playing Allstar 24/7 on Spotify from their iPhones?

It's a dream of mine to hire them for a party and ask them to only play All-Star. No bathroom breaks, no water breaks, just 6 hours of All-Star, baby!

I saw them at a small club gig here in Pasadena a few months ago. They were well aware that's what we were all there to see. Decent show surprisingly though!

I would assume it's not a global playtime, but an individual playtime. If I had an account and only played game X, then game X will earn $7 (70% of my subscription fee). If I played an hour of X and an hour of Y, each game gets $3.50

We're actually doing global playtime now, but we're going to evaluate the per-user model as well to see which works out better for developers in the long-run. We want to make it as fair as possible.

Personally I would prefer knowing that the money I was putting into it was going to the developers of games I was actually playing.

I'm inclined to agree. That said, what would happen if you didn't play any game that month? Would it go straight to Jump or enter a pool to be split?

If we go the per-user route, we'd just split the 70% from that user evenly among games. No reason for us to pocket it, we want our developers to do well.

it's split up based on how much play time each game gets

Is that the only metric? Have you thought about how that might encourage developers to come to you with certain genres of games (and discourage others)? An exceptional but short game with little replay value (like Undertale, for example) might not make as much money as a lesser game with a competitive online component. Do you think your business model is likely to adapt over time?

I'm not criticizing, just curious.

Happy to take criticism! So regarding short games, I think I posted this elsewhere, but to us it's really about finding the RIGHT time to bring your game to Jump.

For games with high replayability (like FTL - I probably played that for 100 hours which is a lot for me), they'd most likely do better on Jump than on premium stores, so they could bring the game to us right away if they wanted.

But, for short games, they're best suited to come to Jump at the END of their premium life cycle, once they've essentially exhausted all premium sales. Then, they'd be capturing users on Jump who probably never bought the game outright, but who wanted to play it, and monetizing them. So rather than thinking of it as "short games make less on Jump than on premium stores" it's better to think of it as "short games can extend their revenue life cycle and engage/monetize new users they never would have through premium sales." We want to be complementary to premium sales, even for short games.

How does Hyper jump affect load times? Do you have any metrics?

The benchmark we give is that most games on Jump will load in under 60 seconds on a 15mpbs connection (my sad home connection speed), although several of our games load much faster than that. We accomplish this with larger games by working with the developers to break up the game's assets into chunks so we only pull down what we need to your computer as you're playing. You don't have to wait every time there's a new chunk, either - it's smart about pulling what you need when/before you need it.

Also, in October, we'll be adding a custom caching system which will let you choose a set amount of storage space (between 0-50GB I believe) to dedicate to Jump games. What that'll do is store games that you've played recently on your hard drive, so that the next time you play them, if they're still on your HDD, they'll load from your HDD instead of from our servers (something like 4-5x faster). No data usage for you on those either!

Now, does that account for poor QoS? I have a very fast internet connection, (gigabit), but because I live in the arseend of nowhere, my QoS is crap. Typically >1000 ms ping on TF2 servers, for example.

Since you're not streaming, I imagine it could perform fairly well. What do you think?

You would be an IDEAL candidate for Jump :) One of our team members has that level of service too and I'm very jealous. Most games should pull within seconds for you.

As for the ping, the only thing you'd have problems with would be online multiplayer games, but that wouldn't be exclusive to Jump.

What measures are being put in place to prevent/thwart piracy after the games are on the hard drive? Namely when all "chunks" of a less-than-50GB title are all present in that space?

Perhaps each chunk is independently signed and auth'd similar to 2FA schemes?

Without giving too much away, have a few hooks that get embedded into each game that allow them to only be run in the Jump environment, so trying to load a game outside of Jump means the game would just hang/freeze. We'll add a lot more, such as device authentication per-account, etc. in the near future.

Are you concerned that it will incentivize making games longer so that gamers stay longer in them and thus those developers getting more of the share? Or that it will penalize shorter experiences. For example, two of my favorite indie games is To the Moon and RimWorld. One takes 4 hours to complete and the other I've played for more than 100 hours so far. But RimWorld is not 25x better and I don't think it'd be fair to give that much more money to it.

I think it's a fairly well known fact that when authors get paid per page, the length of the books generally go up, so it's not a totally baseless concern I feel.

This is where our curation comes in! We actively filter out games that are "gaming" the system for more revenue, and it's actually against our rules to do so. If a game is genuinely interesting and gets a ton of play time (like I played FTL for 100 hours) that's fine, but if they're trying to purposefully game Jump's payout system, they'll get the boot.

You addressed malicious gaming of the system, but not, I don't think, the core premise of his question. (Or at lease what I read into it)

There are games that naturally lead to longer playtimes, like Rimworld or FTL, but there are also very good games that do not have high playtimes but are not worse for having a shorter playtime. (Think Limbo, or To the Moon as OP mentioned)

Paying out a set percentage that is then divided among your developers creates a zero-sum situation. If Game A gets 5% of the month's profit set aside for developers, that's less money available for Game B now. I fear what this situation will do is to make your platform totally worthless to games that are intended to be short, story-driven experiences.

Ah, ok! What I've mentioned in a couple other answers is that while we're on an aggregate (all playtime across all games) model right now for payouts, we're actively evaluating a per-user payout model, where we'd split up payouts based on each individual user's play splits. We won't know which will be more fair to developers until we get deeper into this, but we'll make sure we pick the model that is most fair to ensure super long games don't squash all other developers just because they got played a ton by a small subset of users or something of the like. We'll work hard to do what's best to avoid letting one game dominate, even if that means adjusting our payout model if we find per-user is better.

Thanks, appreciate the straightforward answer! Good luck with your service!

thank you!

Just so you're aware, there is no best model in this scenario. Both are valid, and you are going to have to do better. I mean this with highest regard. Good luck in your optimization efforts at including all options so that each state in the union is represented equally in voting in the president, even though some are huge and have few people, and some are small and have all the people.

PS, when you solve this problem efficiently in one way, please inform the US government.

<takes note down in presidential notebook>

You're right though, the models will just be different. We'll try to find what's best on the whole for everyone, and we even openly discuss this with our developers so they can have input in the process too.

So your system intrigues me... Could you not put in something similar to Netflix where after (in netflix's system) 3 episodes = an "are you still there?" message.

I think if you had someone running the game over... say 4 hours (a typical "grind" gaming day)... couldnt you just put a pop up box making sure the person is still there?

I get auto-logged out often in some online games because I got AFK, forget its running, and I've been fishing for 4 hours. I feel like you could do something similar without interrupting gameplay.

Like a timer that pops in overhead and you have, say, 30 minutes to validate that a human is still at the keyboard.

Just tossing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks. Curious to see the future of this.

Oh yeah, we're doing checks like this on the back end already to try to make play time tracking as accurate as possible, but I'm sure we'll refine over time. Thanks for the suggestion!

I dknt think this system is intended as a replacement for Steam or HumbleBundle or other outlets.

A developer will choose the platforms that are best for them.

Shorter games wouldnt be good on any rental system or service like this. They would never get as much revenue because the entire game would be played in a day.

Not every platform can support every type of game. Shorter games do well when added to bundles of other games. I got a bunch of niche stuff that i enjoyed simply because it was on HumbleBundle.

I agree that we're not trying to replace Steam and other stores, but I'd actually disagree that shorter games wouldn't benefit from Jump and other services that pay out based on play time. Here's the answer I posted above to a similar question:

Once a short game runs the majority of its premium sales elsewhere (Steam, bundles, etc.), then it's basically sold all the copies it's going to sell. BUT, that doesn't mean more people wouldn't play it - they just want to pay for other things over it. So, by bringing it to Jump later in its life cycle, that game can now monetize users who may have never bought it, but still wanted to play it (or just wanted to pop in and try it). This way, developers are monetizing users they would have never captured via premium sales and thus it complements their sales rather than from detracting from them.

We've tried to make it so there's a home for every type of game on Jump - just has to be the right time!

Did you get turned down by any "big" names? What were their concerns?

Do you think Jump is more helpful to smaller, lesser-known games? Is there a reason to put FTL on there instead of just putting it on sale?

Do devs all get an equal share, or is it somehow depend on what games people are playing most?

The reception in the developer community has been very positive thus far - we work with them to find the right time to bring their game to Jump (so there's no risk of cannibalizing any premium sales), and we pay advances to lower the porting risk too, so most developers we've spoken to have been very receptive, including Ed McMillen, who brought his newest game (The End Is Nigh, with Tyler Glaiel) to Jump for launch.

We certainly want it to be helpful to lesser-known games! I think She Remembered Caterpillars is a great example of why Jump can be beneficial. That game won a TON of awards, but sold very few copies. Now that game can have new life on Jump and be played, as it very well should.

70% of all our monthly net revenue goes to our game developers, and that is split up based on play time in each game. So an easy way to think of it is, # of minutes in YOUR game vs. number of minutes in ALL games would be your split of the 70%. We think the payout rate will average between $0.25-0.50 per hour.

Thanks! Best of luck, it looks like a great service. Very reasonably priced, too. Is there anywhere to see all the games without signing up?

Thank you!

Well, we don't ask for a credit card for our 14-day trial, so you could see the whole library AND play a game or two in about 5 minutes ;) haha.

But, I believe a couple news sources posted the whole list as well. We list a nice chunk on our front page, too.

the payout rate will average between $0.25-0.50 per hour

This is interesting. Even on the low end we can take a popular game... lets say counterstrike GO(I know its SUPER popular but im just using it as an example to others)... and lets postulate that the average person stays in for 2 hours. (Personally, i can tell you that this is a significant low-ball. When I ran PSL the wait time would easily exceed 30 minutes for 32 people)

So a game like CS:GO you have (as of this moment) 520,000 players, playing at 2 hours, is $260,000 in a payout from this service... if they pay at $.25/hour

Thats pretty interesting and im curious what the total revenue has been in the two days they've been a service.

So Anthony, do you have a rough estimate of how many dollars have been through your service in 48 hours? I do understand that disclosing income stream and payout might help/harm depending on how folks read it. Even a PM would be nice.

By the way, this service looks extremely promising and I'm probably going to give it a shot. I just want to wait for proper feedback from the end-users

We won't really share numbers publicly to protect our developers, but we're also offering that 2-week free trial, so we won't have numbers for ourselves for a bit anyway!

Thanks for the thoughts here, and really appreciate the kind words. Hope you do give it a shot when you get a chance.

Will you have VR games for the Rift or Vive etc.?

Yes! We actually can already support VR in theory, but our desktop apps are Chromium-based and unfortunately Chromium hasn't released WebVR support yet. Firefox has it, so the tech is basically ready (and we're definitely ready) - just have to wait for support to hit Chromium.

This would be huge for me. I have a Rift but have a hard time swallowing $30+ prices for experiences that are only an hour or two with no replayability. Having more access would get me on board pretty quick.

Yep. Part of the growing pains of a new medium is that no one knows how to price their content, and right now it's mostly wildly overpriced IMO. Jump could be great for VR, not just for gamers who want to play more without breaking the bank, but for devs who never sold many copies in the first place and are now getting buried by new content.

YES PLEASE! I bought a Rift a while back and was actually wishing of something like this, I truly believe services are the next big thing for gaming. Can't wait for you to release VR games, it will be an instant buy for me.

Wonderful to hear!

Good to hear, this is exactly the type of service I am looking for with VR. Post on the Vive subreddit when you go live, I'm sure it will be a hit there.

Thanks! We certainly will.

I think this would be huge for VR. A majority of the VR games are made my Indie developers + the games themselves are much more of a "netflix" type experience where you can play and explore the games for a couple hours and then you have experienced pretty much all they have to offer. Then you are on to the next one.

I wouldn't buy this service as is but if they expanded to VR I would definitely pick it up.

Great to hear. VR is definitely a big part of our roadmap.

Hi! I really like the idea, and will definetly be checking it out.

I have two questions.

• How easy is it so unsub/re-sub to the service? I have fairly long periods of down-time where i don't play, and i find it a hassle to unsub/re-sub to most services.

• I am an avid user of the Steam Controller, and I don't want to go back to conventional controllers unless im absolutely forced to, also i don't own one anymore.

However, the launcher makes the BPM overlay run in Desktop mode, thus leaving me without Xinput. Are there any plans to talk with Steam about making Jump register through Steam as a controller rather than desktop mode? And if not, maybe in the future? I will likely open a ticket to Steam and see what they have to say, but i figure if it comes from someone like you guys, it might be taken more seriously. There are many of us, and we tend to gravitate towards smaller games aswell so it could be a win/win for minimal effort!

Good luck guys!

Thanks!

1. You can unsubscribe at any time, and we'll keep both your profile and game save data warm for you in case you ever decide to come back.

2. We'd certainly like to support their controllers (I have one too), so we'll want to open a dialog with them about it. We're not trying to replace Steam (which is basically impossible), but rather complement it, so we hope they'd be open to it.

What was your biggest challenge to starting Jump?

How is your service different from other game hosting services?

Bootstrapping with no money in our evenings and weekends was definitely a little rough :) That, and fighting the "streaming" stigma since other services in the past have used what we feel to be the wrong technology for this type of service. Once we were able to hire some developers that were more talented than me, we also learned very quickly just how much work goes into building a scalable, stable infrastructure for a service like this. We're very happy with how it turned out, but it was a sprint to get here.

The biggest differences between us and other subscription services is that we heavily curate our library for quality, and that our technology is a great fit for this model across ALL devices for ALL types of games. We're launching first on desktop with just indie games, but by no means does our technology limit us to those 2 things forever - quite the opposite actually.

This service seems great for me, I'll definitely check it out.If one day it also works for mobile, that would completely change mobile gaming for me! There are so many great indie games on mobile but they drown in a sea of money grabbing shovelware.

We agree - you should stay tuned on our announcements over the next 6-8 months, might be some things that you'd like!

Will you setup for these games to process micro transactions, or will it be more traditional and consumer friendly? Will it be add free?

Jump will always be 100% ad-free and microtransaction-free. We want it to be like the Netflix experience in that sense, where there's no upsells or purchases to make - you simply get unlimited access to all the content on Jump for your subscription.

Now for developers who have DLC, we do 2 different things: we either let them bring the full, final game (incl. all DLC) to Jump up front, OR we let them launch the base game first and then release DLC over time. We'll have a row in Jump towards the top of the home page as we get more clever with discoverability called "New Content Updates", so pushing new DLC to Jump will get your game bumped into that category, giving you more visibility and thus a bump in revenue, just as if you were selling it BUT without having to actually sell anything.

Not gonna lie, the part about DLC's might be one of the best solutions to the DLC problem atm. Well done

Wow thanks!

I like the idea, because I loath micro transactions and DLC can be a pain when there's lots of it and they don't provide enough content for the cost. Your strategy solves that issue.

My question is, for the developers who regularly release a lot of DLC, are there any rules in place on what counts as a DLC worthy of the extra attention they'd get by being featured in New Content Updates?

Some devs are slow to release their DLC, but it'll have enough content to be its own game, but others often add tons of small game elements/small story chapters, etc on a regular basis. Seems that extra attention to the latter developer (because they keep adding new content to stay in that category) might be unfair to the former developer.

Yeah we'll be able to draw a line in the sand as to what constitutes new DLC as we build that feature out, but at a high level, actual new content would count, whereas bug fixes or small updates would not. Of course we'll have to get more granular with this as time goes on.

How are you different from utomik? If I were to chose why should I chose your service over theirs?

We love that there are options for supporting developers and particularly indies, so I'm glad they paved the way for services like ours. Our biggest advantages long-term will be multiplatform access, a curated library that grows linearly to give our developers a chance at being discovered (and thus revenue), and our delivery technology which has you up and playing in less than a minute in most of our games.

Have you taken any influence from the fantastic OnLive? It's a shame what happened to such a generous company.

Those guys were ahead of their time. I remember going to GDC in 2011 and they were already huge. They really pioneered this big push to explore new models/tech back then.

How do you plan to be comparative in a web environment if we lose net neutrality?

Ohhh good question. We're actively working on several ways to reduce our data load so that it wouldn't get us throttled (or charged more) as we grow. We'd put a stronger emphasis on these efforts if it looks like things were going south on net neutrality. Let's hope they don't.

As someone who dislikes buying games I'll likely never play, or play more than once, I find your idea very intriguing. However, how will it perform with poor download speeds, as in less than 10mbps down? And how large do you see your service getting in the next few years?

The beauty of Jump is that, since we're NOT streaming, you can still enjoy all the games on Jump even on the worst connections - the download times will just take a little longer to get into games. The games run locally (using your computer's CPU/GPU), so once they're running, your connection speed doesn't matter anymore. I actually do demos via a phone tethered connection often when WiFi is poor/not available.

Our goal is to become the go-to subscription service for all types of games (old and new) across all types of devices.

Will you retire games the same way that netflix retires shows? What happens if I've just picked up a game and started to enjoy it but your catelog no longer supports the game?

We have no intention of rotating games out of the catalog. Our deals with developers are open-ended and revenue share-based, so there's no up-front, timed licensing deals like you see on Netflix or Xbox Game Pass. We want to have an ever-growing library.

Is there anything to prevent developers from abruptly removing their game?

Oh yeah - advance notice, discussion with us, etc. You'd definitely know as a user if a game was leaving Jump in the next month.

So you want to help struggling indie developers find a platform for their games, but you'll only allow games that are already successful? I like the idea at its core, but you seem to be shutting out the very people you say you built it for.

I read it as games that are actually good? Could you direct me to where they said that please

"We have 3 different things we look for in games:

1. Has it won awards? (IGF, IndieCade, etc.)

2. Is it highly-rated? (7/10 on Steam, Metacritic, etc.)

3. Was it just a runaway hit seller?"

I mean I guess it's meant to appeal to a hesitant future subscriber, but it rubs me the wrong way in how it's the opposite of the spark behind the idea.

oh wow, maybe they should have a section for popular ones and one for ones that they like that aren't popular yet

If OP is reading, consider an alternate screening process. Like perhaps have a few curators who play through the games like professional reviewers and journalists do, and your platform could uncover overlooked gems stuck in the Steam noise. Which is what you set out to do as an indie developer yourself.

Still reading :) What I'll add is that, beyond the more objective 3 criteria above, we also hand-pick some games that might be considered provocative or a little on the fringes that we still personally think should get a spotlight. It's not a completely cut-and-dry process for us just so there's a chance for every game to get on. The 3 criteria above are mainly to filter out shovelware.

To your point about curators, we LOVE this idea and are already working with a couple to have them help us pick future games. Then, in the app, you'd be able to see things like "so-and-so's faves right now" and then a list of games they recommend. It's similar to Steam curation, sure, but I think it can work well on this format too.

Do you have any special offerings for twitch streamers? Partnerships, etc? Im not huge, but we have a streamer group called Skill Cap with about 8 streamers with various audience size. I actually just hit Affiliate yesterday, but most of the group is all Twitch Partners. Indie games are right up our alley as we do variety streams!

We'd love to talk, sounds like a great match! Shoot an email to [email protected] and we'll chat.

Is this available in Europe?

Yep! Available in all countries the US isn't currently sanctioning (by law).

any plans on putting your platform on consoles? I would definitely subscribe to something like this on the Nintendo Switch.

I can't comment too affirmatively here, but what I can say is that we're exploring various other platforms as our tech can power the same experience basically anywhere, and we'd have subsets of games specifically designed for each platform to uphold the quality experience the developers intended.

Good to know!

We mentioned this service briefly on our podcast last night. I think it's awesome what you are doing. Have most developers been pretty receptive of joining the platform or has it been an issue to get them to buy in?

Oh that's awesome! We'd love to talk to you about this, you should ping our PR lead at [email protected] so we can chat.

Most developers have been very receptive because we're trying to work with them to be complementary to their sales, NOT to cannibalize them. Plus, we offer them advances on revenue on a case-by-case basis to lower the risk of trying a new service. And I'd say being former indies ourselves helps a bit in the discussions, too.

Is there any plans to make an indie game exclusive to Jump?

We'll look at exclusives within the next 18 months or so, but it has to be a good deal for the developer, too. We'd want to pay them to develop the game rather than bring us their existing game as an exclusive, because we always tell developers to go grab their premium sales first before coming to Jump.

Any chance it works on a Chromebook?

It does indeed! We have a web app version of Jump we've been told works quite nicely. You can sign in to that in the top right corner of our landing page.

This idea has me interested. Soumds like it could be great. Are there any plans to bring Jump to consoles?

What I can say right now is that our HyperJump technology doesn't limit us to just desktop platforms by any means. We've been called the "Netflix of Games" in the press, and Netflix to me is "unlimited access to content on all platforms", so that's certainly our long-term vision.

I'll leave it at that for now! We'll have lots of announcements over the next 12-18 months.

I love couch co-ops. How many are currently in your library, and how do you feel about making sure more are available to play on your platform?

We'll always try to spread around the love as we add games to Jump over time so there's something for everyone. Right now we have 10 local multiplayer games in our launch catalog.

What games are featured right now?

Our current "featured" games are:

The End Is Nigh (Ed McMillen's New Game)

Drive!Drive!Drive! (published by the Bit Trip crew)

Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor (published by tinyBuild)

Robot Roller-Derby Disco Dodgeball (online multiplayer insanity)

Beatbuddy (actually demoed next to them at PAX with our old game!)

Beholder (please or rebel against the motherland)

Ittle Dew (Zelda-like adventure game)

Pony Island (Pony game possessed by the devil - yep)

Teslagrad (award-winning platformer, hand-drawn)

The Bridge (crazy art style puzzler)

We'll rotate featured games once a week so every game on Jump gets a spotlight.

Don’t you think it’s a bit presumptuous to call yourself the Netflix of of indie games? You’ve been live for two days. At this point aren’t you more like the TIDAL of indie games. You exist, but you’ve got a long way to legitimacy.

Good luck, despite how it sounds I’m routing for you.

It's funny, we actually actively avoided the phrase "Netflix for games" when we showed it to press back in July before our beta, but they coined it that way anyway. I think it's just because it makes it easy to understand it's an unlimited access subscription service, but I agree - the value prop for Netflix is "unlimited access to all types of content on all types of devices." That's what we strive to be long-term.

I wrote it in the headline only because that's how people recognize us now - thanks, the media!

Very interesting product! I'll be trying out the free trail.

In the future do you think you would have exclusive titles much like Netflix has original series?

I believe it would incentivize the subscription more :)

Thanks! We will have exclusives indeed, but we want it to be a good deal for the developers too. We'd most likely pay for these games to be developed for Jump rather than ask existing games to be exclusives. Want to make sure our devs get all their premium sales opportunities before coming to Jump.

I assume there's no offline mode? If my internet goes down and I've downloaded the game fully I can't play it?

Offline mode is in the plans! Certainly a priority for us in the next 12 months or so I'd say.

If a game developer decided to pull their game from the platform, will there be a way to purchase the game if you liked it?

I'd imagine the games would be up in other premium stores, so while you may lose your save data if a game leaves Jump (sadly out of our control), you can definitely try to find it elsewhere to purchase.

Does Jump do anything to support the developers financially? What would be the advantage of a developer getting their game on Jump as opposed to Steam?

We actually work with developers to bring their games to Jump AFTER Steam so we can complement their premium sales rather than try to replace them. We pay out 70% of our monthly net revenue to developers and split it up based on play time in each game. On top of that, we also pay developers advances on revenu (case by case basis) to lower the risk of porting their game to a new service with a new business model.

So I'm primarily on linux these days. How much of your game library works on linux, or does your program work on linux at all?

Is that something you're looking into in the future? You mention quite a few times 'coming to all platforms'.

You can actually access on Linux via our beta web app right now (we hear Firefox access is stable), but we're also working on Linux apps. We wanted to have them available for launch, so they'll be coming shortly hopefully!

I see you support Windows, Mac and Linux. Does Jump make it so all games are available on all platforms, or is there a difference in the library between platforms?

On all desktop platforms it's the same library! As we expand to other form factors with different control schemes, each device type will have subsets of games that work specifically for that device, as well as some games that go cross-platform if they're meant to do so.

Why do I pay for 60 indie games when I can find and play a lot of free (and cool indie games) on gamejolt, indiexpo or itch ?

Developers have to eat! By playing games on Jump, every minute you spend in a game is part of a payout to that developer. Of course there are lots of other options out there for getting your games, but if you want to find a place with high-quality indie games where you know you're directly supporting developers by playing their games, Jump is your spot.

Just downloaded JUMP and made an account. Took all of 10 minutes before I was playing "The End is Nigh" from Nicalis. Gotta say, this is a great idea...but how do you plan on getting subscribers to pay $10 a month?

Also...if you have any pull with the Devs...can you please tell Ed and Tyrone from Nicalis to PLEASE release Afterbirth+ on PlayStation Network. It's already 2 days late :(

Edit: Ouch...downvoted?? I guess I will stop posting/replying and go back to being a lurker.

Hah! I don't think I quite have that pull with Ed yet, but I think I saw him tweeting about that, so I'd check his feed.

Really appreciate the kind words. We tried to make it simple - since we're adding 10 games per month and an average indie game on Steam/consoles costs $10, even if you only like 1 game out of our 10 per month, it's the same price as buying 1 game on Steam. Except on Jump, you get 9 other games you can poke around in and see if you like without the guilt of buying a game you may not like, or the hassle of having to return it.

We'll always be adding quality games, and over time, we'll also add access on new devices with new types of content, old and new.

How do you select the indie games to include? Are there subscriptions to certain genres?

I posted our criteria above, but in general we look for 3 things:

1. has it won awards? (IGF, IndieCade, etc.)

2. is it highly rated? (7/10 or better)

3. is it just a runaway hit seller?

And if you're asking if there's subscriptions to specific genres as opposed to the entire service, nope! $9.99/month gets you access to the whole platform.

So is this just for pc or do you have both pc and Mac versions available?

Both! We have PC and Mac apps right now, with a Linux app coming relatively soon. You can access Jump via our web app in the browser (currently in beta) on Linux and ChromeOS already though. We hear Firefox works best on Linux.

First, cool idea. Discoverability for indies is a big deal. Hopefully, everyone will benefit from this.

Second, what's your technology stack like?

Thanks! We hope so too, that's our goal.

Our tech is all native-web driven (HTML5, WebGL, JS, WebAssembly and is built on a serverless AWS architecture for scalability.

Thanks! We hope so too.

Our HyperJump tech is based on a bunch of native web technologies (HTML5, WebGL, JS, WebAssembly) coupled with a WHOLE slew of AWS services. We're a serverless API-based architecture, so scalability isn't as much of an issue as traditional server-based tech (like when PlayStation Now had a wait time to play since no servers were available - ouch).

Do you really think that calling yourselves the Netflix of indie games is a good analogy? Netflix has most every genre of movies, not just indie movie. Perhaps you should be the Netflix of indie games, if Netflix got ride of every movie but the indie ones!

I'd actually agree with you - here's what I said in another comment:

Funny enough, we actively avoided using those words when talking to press back when we announced our beta in July because SO MANY companies use this term. Press coined us that though, which I suppose I can understand because it makes the concept easy to grasp in about 2 seconds.

To me, the value proposition of Netflix is "quick access to all types of content on all types of devices." What I can say for now is, that's our long-term vision.

Funny enough, we actively avoided using those words when talking to press back when we announced our beta in July

Then why are you quoted in this story from July calling yourself exactly that, unprompted by press, but actively promoting yourself that way?

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/301137/Netflix_for_indie_games_How_Jump_aims_to_help_devs_beat_discoverability_issues.php

As you might expect, launching a curated subscription service for indie games that algorithmically generates recommendations has Palma and Peterson pitching Jump as "Netflix for indie games."

"Think of it like Netflix. You go in there now and you get these very specific categories, like indie horror movies with strong female leads," says Palma.

You came out of the box marketing yourself as the Netflix of games. Other followups to this story, like this one, once again quote you when they use the phrase.

You didn't avoid using it at all. YOU coined it.

Yeeeeep we tried to make a pass at like "you can think of it kind of like Netflix" to explain it's a subscription service, and they grabbed it and ran with "Netflix of games, got it." haha. We also told them what I explained above, where we feel like that's not an accurate description of us at this stage (while it's our long-term goal, sure), but they just grabbed the headliner phrase. Egg on our face - it was our first interview.

How do you decide how much money goes to each developer? Is there a percentage of subscription costs that are divvied up among the games played by that user?

Right now, we aggregate all minutes played by Jump users in a month and then split up 70% of our monthly net revenue (our developer payout) based on total play time. So, # of minutes in YOUR game vs. # of minutes in ALL games = your split of the 70% for that month. We'll be closely looking at how the model changes if we divvy up the split based on a per-user basis too, as we want to make sure our devs get the best possible payout situation long-term.

Sounds like ps now on Playstation. 450 title catalogue, streams games and you can play on pc and console. Where does jump position itself in the market against them?

I'd point out 2 things here:

1. PS Now is based on streaming technology, which as we've seen, introduces an inherent amount of latency and quality issues to games even on strong connections, and simply isn't doable for things like VR and eSports (or any twitchy game) because of the latency. Jump's HyperJump tech actually does NOT stream and rather delivers the game to your device in chunks, so it runs as if it were installed, with no latency or quality issues, but also without taking up permanent storage space on your HDD.

2. Our tech also doesn't limit us to just desktop (or to any platform), so we'll be able to expand to lots of different platforms in the future.

I'm sure there's a couple games that overlap still, as with Netflix and Hulu, etc.

If Jump turns out to be a huge success, how will you try to keep other platforms from just copying your model?

I think we'd be flattered if someone copied it :) But they'd have to steal our tech stack too, because Xbox, Sony, and a bunch of other companies have already launched subscription services that use different tech stacks than Jump, and Jump's is the only one thus far that can scale to ALL devices and ALL types of content long-term.

Another thing that separates platforms from each other in the long run is original content, so not anytime soon, but in the future, we'll look at exclusives for Jump that we'd fun ourselves.

Hey, will this support games for mobile too? I feel like a service like this could be great for mobile games quality, since the market is so full now of freemium (soul sucking) content. It would be great to have quality games on mobile that have no chance of doing micro transactions. I think it would lead to the improvement of games on that platform.

I can't comment too affirmatively here, but I can say that we're actively exploring other platforms in the near future and you should expect announcements in early 2018 or so. If we DID go to mobile, we'd stick to our same curation standards, so you'd see great premium games that most likely got buried (and a few you know too). We'd even have some cross-platform games I'm sure!

What was your favorite video game as a kid?

Hands-down, Ocarina of Time. That's the only game I'll pick up and play through probably once a year still. Although I will say, BotW gave it a run for its money in my all-time favorites list.

Played a heck of a lot of Halo, too.

Gotta love honking the warthogs horn in multilayer.

So glad that's translated to PUBG. Makes PUBG feel like home.

Hey Anthony! Would you be collaborating with any YouTubers? I think it'd be great and help get your name out there!

Hello! Oh yeah, YouTubers and Twitch streamers are a big part of our "getting the word out" strategy. We've actually had a couple streamers play Jump live in front of their audience already and let them pick the games they play, which was very cool to see.

Hi! I'm really into this idea and would love to give some support. do you have a Facebook page or website in general for which i could follow, keep up to date and share the news?

Thank you! Of course, we're on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

EDIT: Somehow I forgot to say this, but we also have a Discord server where half of the Jump team and a LOT of our game developers hang out! Come join us and chat more.

How are you guys going to handle responsible growth of your company so as to provide new content to your subscribers consistently, but also not dilute the income stream for the devs by adding too many games?
A question ancillary to the first: I could see cycling through games being a possibility but if this were the case, how do you foresee player frustrations going when a game they’re halfway through being removed and what are you guys doing to mitigate this? What about save data? Will players be able to use their save data on the purchased version of a game?

Great question. We're only looking to launch about 10 games per month on the platform so that the content library grows linearly while our user base grows quicker. This should give developers a stronger chance at revenue as we grow. On top of that though, our recommendation systems will feed you games you'd maybe like based on your play style, so all games will always be getting served up to users that might like them, giving them more chances.

For the 2nd question: we're not planning to remove any games from the service at any time. I think that detracts from the value of an unlimited access service, so our contracts with developers are open-ended and rev share-based so there's no timed licensing deals.

What do you personally think of itch.io? Positives, negatives?

I love itch - it's such a great place of discovering random content that may have never seen the light of day otherwise, and they're VERY indie-friendly, which is awesome.

So how does saving a game work with this platform? Would it be like mobile games where the save files would be linked to the account.

Also how would you account for the many unique saves of all the games for every customer?

All of our games do have cloud save enabled, so you can take your save data with you from device to device.

Right now it's game-dependent - some games let you have more than one save file, whereas others only have 1. We'll eventually introduce "profiles" on your account in the future too, like Netflix, so both your save data and your play preferences will be unique to your profile.

How many users are currently on the platform?

We'll keep that one private :) but we're quite pleased with the reception thus far.

Which is your favorite game to play?

Ohhh, that's a tough one :) I'll try to be impartial, but my top 3 right now would be:

The End Is Nigh (I was a big Super Meat Boy fan)

Ittle Dew (also big A Link To The Past fan)

Pony Island

Do you have an API that handles things such as Cloud Saving or Achievements? And can the game call those things for a return value to check players have achieved them to display in-game etc? Also if you do, what engines is it compatible with (Game Maker: Studio, Unity)?

At the moment, the platform I use is GameJolt. Very low monetary returns but a strong API with some cool tricks you can use it for. As a hobbyist developer, the tools I can use are more appealing than the money I can make.

We work with a 3rd party service called PlayFab that all of our developers get free access to, so all our games at a minimum have cloud save integrated and can use the other services they offer as they please. We also cover Photon costs for multiplayer games.

If you're used to these types of tools already, PlayFab would be right up your alley! It's compatible with every major game engine and even native code languages.

What are your favorite games on Jump right now?

ALL OF THEM. :) but right now I'm playing Pony Island, The End is Nigh, and Ittle Dew.

I sold my console because I didn't like the direction gaming was going. One or two games I liked a year that eventually got killed with greedy DLCs and online elements.

I figured I'd give PC gaming a go because I loved C&C growing up. I got on steam and was inundated with shit games. It's layout seemed fairly poor and frustrating.

Do you try to make this an accessible and user friendly site for people who aren't massive gamers at the moment or are you more focusing on building a library?

I'd say both. Jump's tech allows our entire library to be as accessible as possible, as you can literally just click "play game" and the game is up and running in less than 60 seconds in most cases. We'll grow our library over time to make sure we offer a wide variety of content, but it'll always meet our quality standards so you don't have to sift through shovelware. And, we want to make sure the library grows linearly so developers don't get buried on Jump. We'll always be serving up their games via recommendation systems to people who may like them.

What should everyone check out on your platform?

Ideally? Everything!

Realistically? Our featured games (listed in another question/answer) are really stand-out indies, but there's so many other great games on the service too. I'd suggest Always Sometimes Monsters, Necrosphere, Molemen Must Die!, SOYF, and of course, Stunt Runner (the game we made as an indie studio).