As far as growing our brand, we're going to use all of the typical avenues that a games company might! Twitch and Youtube influencers, physical presence at cons, and twitter/fbook/instagram.
It's taken some work to get things moving, but now that we've got great games like Evoland, Cluster Truck, Redout and tumblestone, we think we've got a virtuous cycle instead of a chicken and egg problem!
You do need an internet connection to launch games, you're right about that!
We use both an API and some encryption to make sure that a game which is saved to your computer is only launchable through the client. If you cancel your subscription, you're going to have a bunch of files you can't use.
However, we don't ever want you to lose the characters you've fallen in love with, even if you leave us, so your save files are yours to keep, and should be compatible with any other windows or steam build of the game!
Our process isn't super formalized yet, but we think we make it pretty easy for devs. We don't really have expected revenue numbers, since we just launched!
We're hoping our discovery system will fix a lot of this. Instead of wall o' games, we want to show you games that are specifically on the list of things you're going to love!
Revenue is distributed on a per-user basis, we think that's hugely important! Thanks for the question :)
But beyond that, I think you just made the case for those games to sign up for a subscription model! If someone's playing a game, say minecraft, month over month, then that developer is getting paid month after month. In other words, if a game takes over someone's life, it'll almost definitely do better per-user on a subscription platform than on a store front.
By the way, check out Flare: http://www.flaregames.com/flare-accelerator/
Even if you end up doing a little worse per-unit gross, chances are your COGS goes down a fair bit.
Second - There's a whole host of technological and model difference that will allow us to be financially better for developers, and to include larger and more technologically demanding games.
And as far as that pay cut goes, I think you'd be surprised as to how much subscription revenue can add up over the year. After all, we won't be 5/month for very long at all. We've definitely seen more replayable games doing better - per user- than they would have on a traditional storefront.
When it comes to integrating those 60 dollar games though, we're going to need to make sure we're not re-creating the problem for the indies that we were trying to solve though.
Oh and, unlike jump, we're currently up and running ;) (sorry, couldn't resist)
We expect the full price to be 9.99 a month, but for anyone who signs up now, they'll keep their plan for the life of their subscription!
We're actually adding a couple more games today including one I'm super excited about, Redout: https://34bigthings.com/portfolio/redout/
Our goal is to have a wide range of games, so that there's something for everyone to fall in love with, but we absolutely plan to be quite selective with what we allow in. If we have a game, it's because it's either great, incredibly compelling in some other way, or very interesting to the gaming nerds out there
I'm Vikram, one of the founders of Dropleaf (http://dropleaf.io), a subscription service for all-you-can-play indie PC games.Zi (Rygeko) and I started Dropleaf because, as gamers, we feel that space around games could be so much better. With the rise of tools that make games easier to make, more people from diverse walks of life are creating games. That means the potential for more games that...