stemz0r

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).

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.

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!

<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.

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!