It's a great question - first of all, we require very, very little(usually zero) technical integration work for games that aren't heavily dependent on steam!
As far as growing our brand, we're going to use all of the typical avenues that a games company might! Twitch and Youtube influencers, physical presence at cons, and twitter/fbook/instagram.
It's taken some work to get things moving, but now that we've got great games like Evoland, Cluster Truck, Redout and tumblestone, we think we've got a virtuous cycle instead of a chicken and egg problem!
Hopefully you'll give us a try! I strongly recommend checking out Cluster Truck or following Warcube through it's development. This thing is going to be the next indie breakout megahit, and you can get the hipster cred :D
We're not going to post our revenue split numbers exactly, but what I will say is that we distribute revenue based on played time on a per-user basis, each calendar month. We share revenue with our devs, with the supermajority of it going to them. In other words the developer portion of revenue will be split 10:1 in your example.
You do need an internet connection to launch games, you're right about that!
We use both an API and some encryption to make sure that a game which is saved to your computer is only launchable through the client. If you cancel your subscription, you're going to have a bunch of files you can't use.
However, we don't ever want you to lose the characters you've fallen in love with, even if you leave us, so your save files are yours to keep, and should be compatible with any other windows or steam build of the game!
Our process isn't super formalized yet, but we think we make it pretty easy for devs. We don't really have expected revenue numbers, since we just launched!
I know what you mean, I have north of 200 games in my steam library. Finding games that seem interesting enough to buy isn't a problem, but finding the games which are going to most deeply resonate with me is almost impossible. It's like opening the fridge, seeing all the stuff you have and then closing it again because you have no idea what you want to make for dinner.
We're hoping our discovery system will fix a lot of this. Instead of wall o' games, we want to show you games that are specifically on the list of things you're going to love!
That's definitely an interesting perspective, but I think steam stats say something a little different, there are hundreds, if not thousands of games that move 100K+ units (and see significant played time from their users) each year. That's a whole bunch of games that a significant number of people fall in love with.
But beyond that, I think you just made the case for those games to sign up for a subscription model! If someone's playing a game, say minecraft, month over month, then that developer is getting paid month after month. In other words, if a game takes over someone's life, it'll almost definitely do better per-user on a subscription platform than on a store front.
We think there's a few key differences:
First - we're focusing on personalized curation, in other words, the content you get recommended to you will be based on your preferences.
Second - There's a whole host of technological and model difference that will allow us to be financially better for developers, and to include larger and more technologically demanding games.
And as far as that pay cut goes, I think you'd be surprised as to how much subscription revenue can add up over the year. After all, we won't be 5/month for very long at all. We've definitely seen more replayable games doing better - per user- than they would have on a traditional storefront.
When it comes to integrating those 60 dollar games though, we're going to need to make sure we're not re-creating the problem for the indies that we were trying to solve though.
Oh and, unlike jump, we're currently up and running ;) (sorry, couldn't resist)
Our goal is to have a wide range of games, so that there's something for everyone to fall in love with, but we absolutely plan to be quite selective with what we allow in. If we have a game, it's because it's either great, incredibly compelling in some other way, or very interesting to the gaming nerds out there