Gamepump Interview

We've been actively working on GamePump for about 9 months now. A lot of that work is legal discovery stuff, tracking down rights owners, finding where games live, and then starting negotiations with the powers that be.

Right now we're trying to keep it as a close knit family. We do a lot of development in-house but also have external partnerships with studios like Wayforward, the 25-year veterans who did Ducktales Remastered. They'll actually be releasing our debut game in January.

There's a bit of curation that happens by me. So we may sit on a finished game for a while to find the right slot for it. The main reason for this is to control the experience a little bit. For example, we don't want the subscribers to receive two months of the same genre, or back to back experiences that have too much in common or come from the same generation of games. Whenever possible, we want every month to feel exciting and diverse by making sure each month flows into the next month well.

We use it loosely, which I hope our fans will enjoy. To us, Classic includes ANY game that has been received and was technically well done and a fan favorite. Age isn't really a factor, as long as it's going to be brand new to our audience and not already in their Steam or GOG library and is a great game, then we'd love to have it in the service. Some games could be as recent as one or two generations ago, others could be 25 years old.

Undetermined, we'd love to keep that discount as long as possible. It may make sense from a business standpoint, as we get into bigger budget projects that we'll have to revert to the full price ($60 a year) but for the foreseeable future of pre-launch and maybe the first month of launch, we want to try and keep the $20 a year pricing.

Our first game will actually be the PC debut of an award winning puzzle game that is fairly recent, after that we're going very classic from a gaming catalog that we actually pulled out of bankruptcy courts for the defunct publisher who once published them. That will give us a large catalog of games which we will spice up and mix a diverse style of games around. My focus, in terms of wishlist, are console exclusives from the NES, SNES, MSX era - those also require the most legal work in most cases, so we'll keep at them while also releasing others we've already received the rights for.

Right now fans have already been tweeting and emailing us suggestions which we follow up on every single one. The fun thing is, many of these fan requests has actually yielded some cool discoveries and often times are actually obtainable for us. So we hope to add in some suggestion functionality into the service to make this process even more streamlined and encouraged.

Yes, yes you can. We'll start tracking those rights down immediately.

It's really all over the place. You have very large AAA publishers who are sitting on amazing retro game libraries but have no incentive to do a deal, so that's more of an emotional conversation. Whereas you have individual creators or devs who have retained the rights to their game and they're super enthusiastic to do a deal and have us bring their games back. Then you have the middle of that, where you have an amazing Japanese publisher who is responsible for some of the most classic games, and they're super enthusiastic but also it is still a slow process to work through those conversations, get the appropriate approvals and align everyone's interests. It's a grueling but really satisfying process.

The first game start's with an "L" and will be a debut to PC and has had brand new levels and even an additional unlockable character added to the game for fans. The interesting thing is our debut game is actually our most recent game too, but the following games go more retro classic. As I said, classic to us can be any great game. The real appeal is bringing stuff to PC that has never been there.