With the rapid spread of high-speed broadband, digital storefronts have finally found their niche in various markets throughout the world. Who needs to shlep down to the local Walmart when you can order this week’s hotness comfortably from the seat of your couch nowadays? Currently, Valve’s Steam service has a clear lead over other services, but there remain a number of audiences who are specifically being catered to by other services such as Good Old Games, or GoG, which offers DRM-free classics from yesteryear.
One such service to recently hit the market is BeamDog. We’ve caught up with one of the co-founders of BeamDog, Trent Oster, who initialized the service in July of 2009 after leaving BioWare, which he helped co-found nearly 15 years prior. Cameron Tofer was also a BioWare veteran, who later became an indie developer and shared a common vision with Oster, thereby agreeing to launch a new venture together.
Growing increasingly frustrated with the PC user experience, these two entrepreneurs teamed up again to “set out to design a better means for finding, buying, downloading, and launching PC software.” Not averse to risk, Oster and Tofer did one year of careful research before implementing their current system, as well as seeking sources of funding, before deciding to lay their retirement savings on the line. Oster’s previous business venture seemed to work out the first time, so why not again?
Fire and foremost, Beamdog is a distribution platform, but it also doubles as a publisher with Overhaul Games Studios, which has been producing exclusives for the platform. “For us to pursue a publishing arrangement, we’d really need to believe we could add value to the title and we would need access to funding,” Oster explained to me. He continued with “I think we could bring good value to many titles, just by applying our experiences from working at a triple “A” developer, but the funding still remains the big barrier.”
Often, smaller development teams don’t have a vast array of funds to work with a publisher. Fortunately, Beamdog doesn’t require one; therefore, self-published titles are welcome with open arms. While the system for accepting new applications is self-described as “sneaker-net” at the moment, the system Oster outlined is surprisingly easy:
- You e-mail us at bizdev.beamdog.com
- We send you our distribution agreement
- You sign it
- We set you up in the system and send you the submit tool
- You put your game up, set the price and availability date
- We test it under XP, Vista and Windows 7 to ensure it doesn’t explode
- The game goes live
Other services such as Steam or IndieCity require external .dlls to be integrated within your title in order to allow it to work within their system. I inquired whether or not Beamdog required the same. “No, we designed a system which doesn’t require code work on the developer’s side,” said Oster. “Developers are too busy trying to finish a game to worry about compiling in our code, so we designed a system which does the work for you. You use the submit tool, it pushes your game up to our service, applies the DRM and sets it to ‘beta’.” Developers even have an opportunity to not only try the game on Beamdog themselves just before it goes live, but may also distribute 50 copies to friends by simply providing their e-mail addresses. Once the studio has decided it’s ready for the public, just hit the submit button, set a price, then Beamdog will test it and launch a few days after.
The common standard for digital distribution platforms (XBLIG, App Store, Android) is to collect 30 percent of the profits from application sales. Beamdog continues that trend, and also takes their 30% cut. That’s not for every title, however. “We have done a few developer appreciation sales where we allocate 100% of all revenue to the developers, but we can’t afford to do that all the time.” Titles are also promoted through the weekly newsletter, and any other way Beamdog can muster up along the way too.
Steam and XBLA have seen great success with huge sales on select titles for a short period of time. Beamdog has most certainly taken note, and does weekly sales as well. These sales generally start on Thursdays and run the duration of the weekend. At the moment there is a sale on select titles between 45%-75% off.
Xbox Live has seen great success with the advent of Achievements, and a few years back Steam took notice and adopted an achievement system of their own. Achievements aren’t out of the question for Beamdog either, but Oster states that simplicity is their current task at hand, stating ” We want to keep the system clean and simple, so any feature has to make a lot of sense and not over-complicate the interface.”
Beamdog believes their ability to spend more time with the customer is what separates them from the rest. This service is showing a lot of promise at the moment and gamers only benefit from competiting services. A common complaint about playing games on the PC are the constant adjustments to hardware and software settings. Beamdog’s target demographic ”likes PC gaming, but are tired of the endless management and tweaking of the PC user experience,” Oster told me. “Our users want to find an interesting game, buy it and get playing with a minimum of hassle.” There are a number of titles on Beamdog also that also cater to an audience who is “more willing to explore games outside of the mainstream, checking out interesting European titles and indie titles that are hard to find anywhere else.” It seems as though they’ve identified a niche market and are attacking it.
Beamdog’s catalog is sparse in comparison with the top dog on the block, Steam, but in fairness Steam has had a 7-year running start and they are catering to two different markets. If you want to learn more, then pay them a visit at their Twitter account, @Beamdoginc, or check out the site at Beamdog.com. Take a gander, and let us know how you think the service stacks up against the competition in the comments below.
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