Over recent years, more and more companies have moved away from the traditional publishing model and set their sights on indie curation.
Inner Pocket Publishing set up its publisher-as-curator model over the summer; now Pantaloon is launching the Playbill, a subscription service for an “evolving library of bold and bizarre” games.
Partly funded by a $150k investment announced earlier this year, the Playbill launches with 14 titles plus Pantaloon’s original games. These include Sub-Verge, Occlude, It Takes a War, Boxroom, Offbeat, and the recently launched Rolla.
“The Playbill is wider than just the games themselves, and aims to offer a connective tissue of curation, conversation and playful systems tying it all together,” Pantaloon co-founder Jamin Smith tells GamesIndustry.biz.
As a curated collection of games, it’s easy to compare the Playbill to the Criterion Collection, which Smith cites as a regular inspiration. “While it’s different functionally, it does share that sense of being on the inner circle of something; of being part of a community of like-minded connoisseurs who share the same passion and excitement for not just the medium but the craft itself,” he notes.
On the games side, Smith says Humble, Apple Arcade, and Xbox Game Pass are “useful comparisons” to the Playbill’s model. However, he points out that these services are “also wildly different” from what Pantaloon offers.
“Those services are almost too big; the vast amount of choice is to the detriment of the surrounding conversation. We want to keep our selection more lean in the service of our community being in step with each other.”
Launch lineup
The Playbill’s full launch lineup includes: Buckshot Roulette (Critical Reflex, Mike Klubnika), Silt (Fireshine, Spiral Circus Games), Ex Sanguis (Firesquid, Lightbulb Crew), Death Crown (5WORD Team), Kids (Playables), Four Last Things (Akupara Games, Joe Richardson), and Cabin Factory (Future Friends Games, International Cat Studios)
Devolver’s Virtue: Prologue (Juno Menager, Deconstructeam, Selkie Harbour) will be a timed-exclusive at launch, a visual novella companion piece to the upcoming Virtue and a Sledgehammer, releasing on October 27.
“We want to keep our selection more lean in the service of our community being in step with each other”
The service also includes exclusive demos, playtests, prototypes, and other game slices. Launch playtests include Isle Goblin (Fireshine, Kilowatt Games), Mr Magpie’s Harmless Card Game (Behaviour Interactive, Gambit Digital, Giant Light Studios), and Lemonade Apocalypse (Pantaloon).
As Smith explains, partner titles are offered “a simple, flat, wholesale key purchase” to feature in the Playbill. “We compensate our partners for an amount of keys, and when we have more subscribers than we do keys, that title will leave the Playbill. It may come back, of course, but it also gives us cause to put something new in (at the new higher key threshold) and keep the service invigorated with fresh games. Our own titles will sit in the service indefinitely, too.”
The full roster of games is available through a ‘Primo’ subscription ($4.99/£3.99 monthly, or $49.99/£39.99 annually). The annual subscription unlocks the entire collection of games immediately.
Game pass comparisons
The Playbill builds on Pantaloon’s newsletter, which recently hit 50,000 subscribers. Newsletter subscribers can complete puzzles to earn game keys or pay £3.99 a month for guaranteed access. The Playbill’s profile, puzzles, and community features are free to access via the Playbill.
“If we’ve done one thing well, it’s curating a portfolio through-line that resonates in the minds of developers”
“Newsletter subscribers have always been the holy grail of our business KPIs, as everything else orbits around that figure,” Smith explains. “The wider our sphere of awareness, the more powerful our pedestal of discoverability, the better the games we can attract to the Playbill, and the more subscribers come back in the top of the funnel. And so it goes round.”
“My initial focus for Playbill is to get to a 5% conversion to a Primo conversion. Then onwards and upwards from there.”
Launching a subscription service like this is ambitious. With Xbox Game Pass still struggling to make it work, even with a huge budget, how does Smith think the Playbill will succeed where Xbox hasn’t?
Smith admits that Pantaloon’s latest offering is “another mad experiment in a series of mad experiments that have – so far – not sunk the business.”
“The subscription service is indeed a hard one to make work. I don’t think anybody’s cracked it for the indie space, where the dev-budgets and price points possibly make it more viable. We’re coming at it from a fundamentally different direction, trying to solve fundamentally different challenges.
“The Playbill aims to be a filter of sorts; a little sanctuary from the algorithms where games are hand-picked and curated based on different vectors. That’s not to say we’re only platforming more art-house or less commercial works, I’m just keen to build a platform that surfaces vibrant titles of different sizes and shapes, removing any friction to discovering and trying something novel.”
Holding out hope
Jamin is open about the fact that the Playbill might not work. “But it can scale sustainably in step with our subscriber base, and is attempting to solve problems that I genuinely believe affect the long term health and success of the studios doing the most interesting work (i.e. taking the biggest creative risks).”
Since expanding into publishing in 2025, Jamin says that Pantaloon receives 10 to 15 pitches a week.
“If we’ve done one thing well, it’s curating a portfolio through-line that resonates in the minds of developers. While we fly the flag of the ‘bold and bizarre’, we’ve managed to capture something a bit broader; games that play with the form and expectation of genre, games that are subversive, games that abuse convention.”
“We’re definitely getting the right stuff through the door. The next phase is to achieve what Devolver and to a similar extent Annapurna, have achieved in the mind of the consumer. We want to be at that point where somebody will blindly pick up the next Pantaloon game because it is a Pantaloon game, and know exactly the type of experience they’ll be getting. And this philosophy extends to what’s in the Playbill, too.”