A Game Pass for indie games: meet Indie Pass, a $7-a-month subscription launching with 70 titles

Independent game publisher Indie.io is launching a subscription service called Indie Pass, which will offer access to a revolving catalogue of indie games for $6.99 a month.

The platform is set to go live on April 13 and will launch with around 70 titles, many of which are from the company’s existing stable of games, such as Echoes of the Plum Grove and the Dark Deity series, but the firm is working to sign up games from other developers, who’ll earn from a revenue share based on player engagement.

The pitch to potential participants, says Director of Growth Jess Mitchell, is increased discovery for featured titles, and a way to drive revenue from their back catalogue. For users, it’s a curated service of “distinctly indie” titles that changes each month, and a way to “discover titles they might not have otherwise heard of, or maybe didn’t have a chance to see them spike and then disappear from a storefront,” care of a recommendation system that tracks their engagement.

The platform is an outgrowth of Indie.io’s work running both a publishing label – a catalogue of over 200 games across multiple platforms, with PC as the “home base” – and community platform wiki.gg, for which Mitchell claims an audience of 10 million monthly active users.

“We take making developers successful very seriously,” Mitchell tells GamesIndustry.biz . “And so, rather than just sticking to traditional publishing, we try to reinvest in solutions and ways to help our developers gain additional exposure.”

“Candidly, one of the biggest challenges indie developers face right now is the sheer number of games out there. That number seems to be growing by the minute. If you don’t have a huge splash on your launch, then you might not have another discoverability moment for three, six, even twelve months after release.”

“One of the biggest challenges indie developers face right now is the sheer number of games out there”

Hence, Indie Pass: a way to surface smaller titles in an ever-busier landscape, while also focusing on a very specific audience.

The goal is not “simply to get every single possible game on the platform and make it a hugely robust service,” Mitchell continues. “There are options for that already. Instead, we offer a distinctly indie, distinctly curated collection for people who really enjoy the experience of an indie title. Maybe it’s a shorter play style, or they can get through an entire narrative experience rather than something that’s more live services-oriented or an ongoing title to have in one place. And we think that that’s going to bring new audiences even if the title itself is not brand new.”

Revenue sharing

The platform will pay developers on a revenue-sharing basis, based on how much time each user spends playing their game.

“We’re going to be giving our developers analytics on how people are engaging with their game,” says Mitchell. “And then continue to work with them on if they want to bring additional catalogue, or in the event that they aren’t receiving the demand, we can be honest with them and upfront about them on that too, because ultimately we want consumers to find what they want and we want developers to feel like they’re really earning new eyeballs from the experience.” We press Mitchell on how specifically developers will be compensated; if a consumer is spending $6.99 per month and plays two games during this time, are the creators going to be given roughly $3.50 each, minus platform costs?

“Yes, it’s an egalitarian model,” she says. “In the same way it is on a storefront: where a consumer’s money goes is where the developers are going to see it.” Mitchell admits that customers playing lots of games per month would thus diminish the payment to each developer, but says she would “rejoice” to have that problem. “I think realistically, most consumers are busy people,” she says. “Without having any player data here, it’s hard to predict exactly what the future looks like. But again, if I have a problem like they’re playing ten or more games per month, we’ll be addressing that as we need to.”

Mitchell is also confident that Indie Pass will not damage games’ sales performance, counter to concerns expressed over Microsoft’s Game Pass service. “Every model is a little bit different,” she says. “Obviously, Game Pass offers a much more expansive option for players who want to play on console or an all-in solution, including AAA and AA games. We’ve also participated in other subscription services. The way I think of any subscription, based not only on how we see our own games performing in them, is that it’s a rising tide lifts all boats situation.”

“We want games to partner with us because they want that discoverability and to find new audiences”

As for what games are going to be on the platform, Mitchell says that Indie Pass’ curation is not necessarily focusing on titles that match the $6.99 monthly cost.

“We want games to partner with us because they want that discoverability and to find new audiences that maybe they haven’t been able to tap into through other storefronts previously,” she explains. “What those games retail for today might vary dramatically. In our own catalogue, for example, we might release a game that’s $5.99. We might also release a game priced at $29.99. We’ve run the gamut there. Some of our games are shorter narratives, some of them are endlessly replayable, depending on the play style you want. We want the consumer to tell us what they gravitate to the most, and that’ll continue to help us inform what we do with the platform.”

Mitchell says that the plan is for new games to be added “regularly” to Indie Pass. The platform is “ultimately open to anybody who wants to participate,” and there are no exclusivity requirements so studios can launch “day and date” on the subscription service as well as on other storefronts.

“And then they also have the opportunity to bring their catalogue to us if there’s maybe an updated title or something that they want to bring extra visibility to,” she said.

Mitchell says that Indie Pass has received a lot of inbound interest in the back catalogue point. This is an area she says she is “very enthusiastic about”, as drumming up interest for these older games can be challenging.

“There aren’t a lot of ways where catalogue gets rediscovered over time, particularly in the indie space”

“We also operate our own massive catalogue that we want to have constantly rediscoverable by people. Not every developer is creating a franchise,” she says. “Not every developer is creating this huge narrative story that’s going to grow for ten years. A lot of our developers put out a game and they say, ‘That was the body of work. That is what it is. Please shepherd my release into the future.’ And so yes, we’ve definitely had a lot of enthusiasm on that.”

“There aren’t a lot of ways where catalogue gets rediscovered over time, particularly in the indie space. It can be very challenging if you’re not constantly building new updates to the game, new DLCs, or even just having the scope to have people come back to you endlessly, and goodness knows there’s no shortage of new games every day.”

Looking towards Indie Pass’ launch on April 13, Mitchell is wary of predicting how things are going to go (“If we know anything about this space, it’s that you really can’t predict anything accurately,” she says). For now, the main aim is to ensure that the platform is available where consumers are already looking for games and that users are being recommended games relevant to them.

The system is “very similar to how I would imagine Steam’s algorithm works,” says Mitchell.

“These games are tagged. We have a good idea of the type of play experience they’re going to have, or we can also base the recommendation on the kind of features and gameplay style that the player wants to use. If you’re a keyboard player, or if you prefer to use a controller. If you’re playing from Poland, we’re going to have games localised into Polish.”

Indie Pass will also measure player session time to inform what it recommends, Mitchell says, a metric which will also “help us better inform the kind of games that we invite to participate on the platform.”

Ultimately, Mitchell says, the focus is on getting IndiePass into the world and then reacting to how it’s used – with the number one job being to get people using it, something she says the firm is confident in.

“We have our own very large audience of players just baked into how we’ve already worked over the last few years as a publisher. We’ve got retail partners and distributors who are supporting us globally. We’re working with a great media team. And then of course your very traditional marketing goals, paid social and paid advertising.”

“Our focus is on growing the player base as rapidly as we can rather than trying to get every single product in the universe on the platform.”