[Pedro_Magna]

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.

[btown]

This is a necessary first step, but I think it's only part of the solution. It's not enough to just improve the visibility of a set of indie games, as Spotify did for artist visibility - you also need to provide ways for creators to benefit from mega-fans with disposable income, while ensuring that balance is sustainable and not predatory.

Spotify's merchandise stores and concert notifications are IMO a pitiful shadow of what they can and should be, and what you can and should be - imagine a Patreon-esque system with tiered badges and in-game supporter perks, with verification built in at your DRM layer, the Discord tiered-role features that Patreon integrates with, award-gifting, etc. Draw a hard line at what kinds of monetization is and isn't acceptable, and become a breath of fresh air in the monetization debate. There's so much possible here beyond subscription distributions, and you could cement your reputation as an innovator and ally to a whole world of brilliant creators.

[Pedro_Magna]

Love this, you just gave us a pot of golden ideas, thanks!

[setgree]

I'm not sure how this addresses the fundamental problem, which is that Spotify pays a very low price per stream, so you have to be a huge star to make any money, and Spotify is taking a large part of the proceeds in the meantime.

Also there's the secondary problem that Spotify has an incentive to produce easy-to-digest content in house for which it pays lower (or no) royalties [0].

For you, the equivalent of problem #2 is your incentive to make deliberately addictive content of no artistic merit. Easy to say you won't do this, a lot harder when your backers demand growth and your analytics team demonstrates that Angry Birds For Tots will maximize engagement.

Don't get me wrong, I think you have a cool idea and I hope it works, but everything you say about your commitment to devs is cheap talk, and in my experience, such ideals tend to get discarded during, e.g., difficult funding rounds.

good luck!

[0] https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/the-fake-artists-problem-is-...

[Pedro_Magna]

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).

[htag]

> we are keeping the revenue per player the same if not more

Isn't this the same as saying players will pay at least as much as they are in existing markets?

[robswc]

>so you have to be a huge star to make any money

Forgive me if I'm missing something, however I don't understand what exactly is wrong with this. Isn't this the case with any "art-type" career?

Are there any services that pay a flat-rate per stream?

[candiddevmike]

I predict that will change the minute a hot indie game that would significantly boost your subscriber count says they want some amount up front/guaranteed to be listed on your platform (and the math checks out).

Unless you transparently publish your financials, there is no way to be held accountable to this system.

[Pedro_Magna]

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.

[sharemywin]

you could always allow the indie devs to vote on "exceptions" to the model.

[k3liutZu]

I wish Spotify (and iTunes) would do this as well for music.