EA’s Chris Evenden has already said that he believes the future of video games is in streaming, but another company may have been him to the punch.

In September of 2017, the game streaming service Jump launched with a goal of curating the massive sea of games into something more recognizable for users, but with CEO Anthony Palma coming from an indie game background himself, the goal is also to foster and help grow the community around these games, and this is what makes Jump so interesting.

We’ve often said we believe community is the path forward for gaming, and Jump seems to envision this as well. On the user side, the goal is for Jump to become a service that tailors content to users, that finds what they enjoy playing and suggests similar games, cutting through the chafe of dozens or hundreds of games to deliver the ones a specific gamer wants to play.

On the developer side, Jump wants to see the community flourish. In an interview, Palma told us that Jump’s goal is always to work with developers for what is best for them. That means letting them go through a natural release process on marketplaces like Steam – with release, sales, initial burst of buyers – and to then work with Jump to continue to monetize the game and grow the audience around it. Speaking with Palma, it all seems very natural.

But Jump hasn’t sacrificed anything to do that. Unlike other marketplaces, which download a game in its entirety before play, Jump downloads games incrementally to the users, essentially allowing them to play most games within a single minute of selecting them from the library. In this way, it brings the immediacy of a streaming service like Netflix without the hassle of waiting for the full download. It also helps hugely for users with low speed internet or those who live in places of spotty or temperamental internet. And even among very graphic intensive games, the service functions the same. It’s designed to work from the smallest pixel art titles to the most intense Unreal engine titles.

While most rental services have long since died out, the on-demand streaming model has been its far superior and successful successor. This model especially makes sense with many indie titles because of their relatively shorter length. For many users, the length of a game is paramount to the price point of it. Because Jump offers a subscription fee and then access to numerous titles, it changes the perception of length and worth of titles. Like Netflix’s audience, many users might find a hard time forking over money for a single title they’ve never heard of, but if it is just a part of a much larger library, it makes it far more appealing.

Though Jump is still in its infancy, the potential for exclusive content, titles, or publishing is something that Palma said they are definitely interested in exploring. For now, they are taking it slow and working with their community – Palma personally sends email updates about changes and progress that Jump is making. But he has also said that Indie games are just the beginning. Jump has plans and goals for AAA titles in the future, and they may just become the platform that EA was hinting towards.