Posted in: Games, Review, Video Games | Tagged: indie dev, indiedev, Jump

Exploring Our Indie Game Options With "Jump"

Depending on the kind of gamer that you are, you either have a passing fancy for indie titles or you're totally enamored with them. And while you can find many of them on Steam or GOG, they're still buried under the mountains of AAA titles that dominate the main store pages, with the rare exception of one jumping to the top on the popular titles list. As a counter-balance to this, Jump Gaming was formed a couple years ago with the intent of creating a platform specifically for these games, which they simply have called Jump.

Jump is a subscription-based platform app where you pay $10 for unlimited access to indie titles. Once you set up a subscription, you then download the app to your PC like you would Steam and log into it. The app itself is self-updating and will download new additions to the program the minute you load it. The front splash page shows you a suggested title right off the bat, followed by several titles below for you to check out. Each one shows the name and the artwork, along with logos indicating whether you use a mouse and keyboard and/or a controller to play it.

The best feature of this system, by far, is the fact that you don't download any of the games. They are stored in a library that you access through the app. All you have to do is choose it and the app loads up the game for you to play immediately. The games have little to no dropped frames and lag doesn't really exist in the system unless you try pushing one of these games to their limits in every way possible. Jump went to great lengths to assure that the system could handle thousands of players at a time on a single game. Everything is divided up on the main page, first by showing the Featured games, then going genre by genre and showing you what they have to offer, followed by multiplayer games both online and offline co-op. Essentially whatever you feel like playing is at your fingertips, as long as it's an independent title without a major studio or publisher backing it. Bonus points to them for having any games requiring a save point added to my account so they're always there!

The major drawback to this is that a lot of the indie titles you may be familiar with just don't exist on here, primarily because they've either been out for a long period of time or because they've become so popular that they might as well be a major release. That may seem like a strict guideline, but it's a necessary one as you need to define what an indie title is in several aspects to keep the system honest and please people who are looking for stuff that's not been sitting in Early Access for years. The other downside is that because the system is new, the library is not as expansive as those who have been doing this longer. Your subscriptions is basically a bet that things will grow and get better over time, and that you won't get tired of their library.

Overall, Jump is a nice service, but a little pricey and a little lacking for the time being. I'm sure once it has been active for a year, Jump will be a decent competitor to other services, but right now it's a system on the grow. The $10 subscription is your way of supporting them and helping them grow, as this may be a better alternative for people to get their hands directly on several indie games at once without paying for all of them individually, but sign up with the knowledge that it will take time to add more stuff.

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