Ready Makers has launched a $7 monthly subscription plan for its Ready Games app, which offers 130 minigames for competitive casual game players on Android and iOS.
The company previously created a creation tool, Ready Maker, and now it has a follow-up mobile app, Ready Games, which holds esports tournaments for its casual minigames. The Ready Maker app has accumulated more than 1.4 million players in the past six months.
Calling it “the Saturday Night Live approach to gaming,” Ready Makers plans to add three minigames every week for its audience, which competes for real cash in online tournaments.
“Since my first byline for Wired in 1994, I believed that games — and eventually the Internet — would lead to profound cultural changes,” said David Bennahum, CEO of Ready Makers, in a statement. “Now 25 years later, touch-enabled devices are everywhere, and games are no longer exclusive to ‘hardcore’ players. There’s a huge, untapped market for casual games that can be enjoyed competitively by an audience that is 60 percent female and does not identify as ‘gamers.’ Where Ready Maker has democratized software creation, The Ready Games gives casual players a chance to test their skills against competitors worldwide and also benefit financially from playing. The Ready Games is a game-changer in every sense of the word.”
The Ready Games subscription
Ready Makers is making the last 30 days of games (and more to come) available for a single monthly fee. The company hopes to make this subscription model the basis of an eventual “Netflix of mobile games.” Special perks for subscribers are also included, such as nine extra lives per month, access to past games, and exclusive access to secret game codes.
With The Ready Games, iOS and Android users can compete for real money by playing mini-games. Players have unlimited practice runs to hone their skills, but they each have only one official run to compete for the prize and achieve the highest possible score.
The top 20 percent high-scoring players get to split the prize. The company has 21 employees, and its directors and advisers include Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick, who was the first investor and director; and Jason Calacanis, Silicon Valley angel investor.
Asked how to get mobile gamers to pay for something, Bennahum said in an email to GamesBeat, “You create a product that’s perceived as sufficiently valuable to people — in our case the opportunity to win real cash prizes and play a vast library of games is sufficiently appealing that our audience converts. We do have a bit of an unfair advantage in that you’re ultimately buying access to a platform of games, and not just one game. It’s the distinction between subscribing to Netflix vs renting a movie a-la-carte. The wind is also at our back — the overall rate of growth for in-app purchases and subscriptions is well documented — subscriptions are the fastest growing revenue source for apps.”