For the team behind the indie streaming service Jump, February marked a major milestone.
Six months after their initial launch, the service is set to offer its hundredth game to subscribers. Not only that, but their catalogue has grown and expanded to include a variety of genres. The service grants subscribers access to a full library of indie games. All for the price of a cup of coffee.
For CEO and founder Anthony Palma, the experience of seeing years of work pay off has been surreal.
“We’ve been working on this as a product, I think we came up with the idea in early 2015,” Palma says. “We saw where some web technologies were going back then that really power what we’re doing now. So it’s kind of bizarre for me to see the number of games that are live on the service, the number of people that are enjoying it.”
A New Lease On Life
Anthony Palma, CEO of Jump. Photo courtesy of Jump.
Jump officially launched in September of 2017. The service marked Palma and his company’s second attempt at finding a place in the indie market. Originally created as an indie game development studio, Jump found little success. Soon it began searching for other ways to take part in the industry. Then Palma hit upon the idea of indie game streaming.
Their success hasn’t been beneficial solely to them though. Through their business model, the company curates titles to the best of their abilities. They seek to select acclaimed and noteworthy titles across a variety of genres. Some of their benchmarks titles include Edmund McMillen’s The End is Nigh. The adventure/platformer set in a bleak and dismal world sits alongside World End Economica, a visual novel series written by the creator of the popular anime Spice and Wolf, Isuna Hasekura.
“There’s been so much launching on Steam, and now with Steam Direct literally any game can just pay $100 and put their game up,” Palma says. “So by us curating, we’re telling you that everything in our library is of a certain quality, and as a user you can know that every game that you try is going to be a good game.”
Once selected, the company pays royalties to the games’ creators for the use of their game. Developers also receive revenue based on how much the game was played by subscribers each month. For Palma, this provides a way to support developers who share his early experiences in game development.
“I came fresh out of college trying to found this company as a dev studio and really struggled to get off the ground, because it was around that time of Steam Greenlight and everything going live, and everything was very hard to get discovered from then on,” he says. “I think doing what we do now and helping developers get their games discovered, even if it’s later in their lifecycles, is very gratifying for me as a former indie dev.”
Paving The Way To Future Endeavors
And yet, Palma still sees where the service could stand to improve and grow. This includes expanding its availability to multiplatform status.
“We’ve talked about how our technology is not limited to just the desktop, so we have some plans for this year for expanding to other platfroms and supporting more than just Windows, Mac and Linux as a service,” Palma says.
Likewise, the increase in variety and quality of content on the service remains a constant priority. In addition to the game’s current offerings, Palma hopes to add more high profile games for subscribers. This includes adding titles from shooter and multiplayer genres within the year.
“We need to grow the library,” he says “We’ve started with smaller indie gems and a couple indie hits like Nidhogg and The End is Nigh, but we need to scale up into larger scale content and draw more, like a broader audience that isn’t just interested in indie games, but is interested in more. So we’re expanding into different types of content in 2018 and starting with some larger indie hits that you would know by name as well as some of the older retro content that we’ll be looking into for later in the year.”
That said, he promises providing quality indie content, and supporting those who create it, is still the company’s top priority.
“Even as we grow into bigger content, indies will always be at the forefront of what we do,” Palma says.
Jump is currently available for use on PC and Mac Linux with a monthly subscription fee of $4.99. For more on the service, check out some of their most recent additions made since the new year.
