Small games could be getting a big boost.
Gaming company Pathless Productions launched a platform for indie games named Ludare in June.
The company hopes to revolutionize the way indie games are played and how developers make money. Matt Stone, the CEO and lead engineer of Ludare, described what the company viewed as the five-year goal.
“[The] goal for us is to build a place where indies can take the core ideas that they’re working on and bring them to market in a way that isn’t going to cost them half their lives or a couple million dollars,” Stone said.
Steven Atha, the partners manager at Pathless, highlighted the uniqueness of what they’re doing.
“We’re in what’s called a ‘blue ocean,’ to use the business term… no one [else] is doing this,” Atha said. “And that’s really exciting, because you don’t have a lot of competition, and you’re inventing things as you go.”
According to Atha, Ludare works through subscription fees paid by players, which Pathless will distribute to the different games on their platform based on the amount of minutes a specific player has spent on a specific game. This method is different from the way other gaming platforms like Google Play Pass, Apple Arcade and Xbox Game Pass pay the developers of the games on their services. Pathless will have access to the data from the platform the game is hosted on like Steam, Epic or Xbox.
They currently have two games, with “three [more games] in the pipeline right now that are very close” to being on the platform, according to Atha. As the partners manager, Atha is responsible for approaching developers to see if they would be interested in putting their game on Ludare.
Atha described the platform as “a collective Patreon for the games on the platform” and said that it is meant to be as “developer-friendly as possible.”
One way Ludare shows that aspect is through the way it handles the subscription fee. While other platforms take 30% of the subscription fee, Pathless only takes 20%. Originally, they only took 10%, but they had to change that, according to Atha.
“We really wanted to take as little as possible and do whatever bootstrapping it took to make that possible, and it just wasn’t viable,” Atha said. “We just wouldn’t have enough money to stay in business and serve the people we’re adding to the platform.”
As they’re starting out, they’re providing cash advances to developers upfront in an effort to increase the amount of developers that are on their platform.
“It’s definitely a temporary thing, but who knows?” Atha said. “If the cash advance works, even when we’re farther along and we’ve met a lot of our goals, we’ll keep doing it.”
Stone previously worked at other gaming studios. He worked at Triple-A gaming studios for the past six and a half years, such as 343 Industries (now known as Halo Studios) and ZeniMax Online Studios, before starting Ludare. He wanted to make a platform that would provide small games with more financial security, as right now in the industry, “small games […] are not getting funding […] or publishers,” according to Atha.
Because of that, Stone wanted to fundamentally change the way the industry engaged with their audiences, and he felt that a subscription model was the best way of doing so.
“If we just engage with the same system that we’ve been doing for the past four decades… we are constantly boxing ourselves in, in terms of what we can do, in terms of how we can make things, in terms of what models can even work in this industry,” Stone said. “I feel like we needed to go out to try to do something different, find some other way to engage with our audiences, and look around, see what’s out there, playing with the numbers. A subscription model just makes a lot of sense as a new step towards what we can potentially be doing.”
The next steps for Ludare are to increase awareness of their platform.
“Ideally, we want to reach the point where we’re a household name for indie games, and everybody who’s got a small game gets that they just will not make money if they self publish, and publishers won’t touch them,” Atha said. “But we are the alternative, and so they’ll know us and come to us and they’ll get it that they’ll build money over time as people play their game more and more.”
Emma Higgins, a sophomore game development and interactive design major, is a fan of indie games, but wants the platform to grow a bit more and add more games before using it.
“I’m not entirely sure how Xbox Game Pass monetization works, but paying by minute sounds like a better way to distribute it than what they are doing,” Higgins said. “At the same time, I also think: ‘How can you really measure a game based on how many minutes you get out of it?’ So, I like the monetization, but I still don’t think it’s perfect.”
Atha stressed the importance of being innovative and reducing the amount of games that leave the platform, as currently, games on platforms like Xbox Game Pass are frequently removed.
“We’re here to be different,” Atha said. “That’s the goal.”