To get players, we're looking at influencer partnerships. That's where the indie community tends to be. To get games, it is a bit tougher. Individual outreach, partnership with large publishers, partner with gaming conventions... nothing's off the table. Still got to figure it out!
the constraints of canva hehe. Good that you like the idea, streaming is interesting but as said in other replies, its presents a much tougher business model. Hopefully one day!
Depends a lot on the game and player. It's true, there are many short, narrative indies out there. But there are also roguelikes, strategy games, simulation, survival, city-builders, etc. which can be infinitely replayable. Even a game like BoI as you mentioned, it is known for being really replayable due to the sheer amount of items you can collect. Not ever indie is replayable, but there are plenty. And, we also want to have non-replayable games, we just haven't figured out the best model yet.
Basically, we pay a higher price per player than Spotify pays per listener, which closes out with the unit economics of indie game sales. Whereas Spotify represented a huge drop in revenue per listener to artists (before piracy), we are keeping the revenue per player the same if not more (for replayable games, shorter games are still a challenge).
I feel like a Mac first sub would be too limited in market, something like 95% of the players on Steam use windows as an OS. Shame to hear that though, I think we'd probably have to win you as a consumer some other way maybe... competing for content is likely not the solution when going up against Microsoft and Epic.
Interesting, most of the devs we talk to are pretty concerned about not having DRM. Same goes for implementation, they want the least amount of work possible.
You're right about penalizing smaller titles though, we're trying to figure that out at the moment. Pay per install is interesting, thanks for the suggestion!
Those are all valid points, but I think the trade off might not favor them. Although piracy mighttt in some situations help games, I don't see how it could help us. No free trial would mean we miss out on users too. Plus, from what we've been talking with devs, they don't seem to like the idea of being DRM-free.
Having some kind of "early access/alpha" is an idea we had, but something more like patron is a really good idea. Thanks for the suggestions on network effects! We're doing our first YT partnership on Monday, so I'm excited to see how it goes!
Glad to hear you like it! Haven't done that, but it's pretty easy to find some really great hidden gems! We already have a few really amazing titles that are quite small on other platforms, check out Existensis, Evertried or Super Mombo Quest!
Great book, already read it! I don't think GOG is very good for the developers, and not having DRM would also harm our business as we'd miss out on subscribers that pirate games and leave.
I appreciate your opinion on the value prop too. I'm curious though, is there anything you feel is missing out from these other stores that maybe we could do?
It is both a requirement from the devs/publishers, but also for ourselves. Without DRM, someone could make a free trial, pirate all our games, cancel their sub and play them out without paying. That's a pretty interesting article though, I guess it shows the power of word of mouth negating piracy? As even those who pirate it will talk to their friends about games they are currently playing.
We could offer more stuff on top of the distributed subscriptions. But, we're not going to be changing our model without letting developers know. I'm pretty sure we'd be committing some kind of fraud.
Fair criticism, the model right now truly favors replayable games. If a game sells for $20, it probably gets $10 after commissions and sales taxes. That's probably mean someone needs to play a game for a little under 2 months to earn the same on MagnaPlay, which should be the case as people on average play 5 games a year on Steam. Consider the extra revenue from players who wouldn't normally try out the game, and developers are probably earning more per player than on other platforms. This is still a bit hypothetical, so hopefully we can confirm this when we have more data!
But, to be fair you're right in that we still haven't figured out the best way to pay shorter games. Right now, the upside for them is more distribution. About the new launchers thing, it's a tricky problem to work around. We've thought about just using a website, but you run into issues with DRM implementation.
User retention is quite tricky, especially for gaming. We think that it won't be too hard adding new content, since there are so many titles releasing each year, but getting highly anticipated titles might be tough.
We think part of the solution will be adding features to MagnaPlay which go beyond just the games. A good example is Spotify, they have a great content library like many other services, but they also have your curated playlists, artist-specific radios, Spotify wrapped, etc. I think getting good user retention will ultimately depend upon the kind of community we can build, not just the content (although it also is a key part).
Placed it really well! Ultimately, it comes down to the business model. Streaming is very capital intensive and requires more tech built out, both from us and the devs (adding barriers to entry to MagnaPlay).
Streaming is definitely going to be something of the future, we just don't think it is 100% there yet, costs still need to drop a bit further.
Nope! We pay devs by distributing player subscriptions at the individual level, not the aggregate. I.e. what others play on a given month doesn't affect how we'll distribute your subscription in that month. This way, devs are meritocratically paid according to how many people are playing their game, and it doesn't matter if that is 1 person or a 100,000. We consider adding diminishing returns and other factors to our model to maybe help smaller titles, but there are no solid plans at the moment.
Not us! Funny coincidence though. We chose "Magna" because it means great/big in latin, maybe they had a similar idea. Interesting service too, hadn't heard of it before. Was it discontinued? I saw the website didn't have an SSL certificate anymore.
That's a good idea, I think partnerships are definitely the way to go, especially with content producers like HB. White-labeling is also very interesting, we know of a few really good examples of that in the mobile market. Probably something more towards the future though, right now we're focused on getting content!