Stay Informed
Get Industry News In Your Inbox…
Sign Up Today
As the App Store and Google Play garden walls crumble thanks to global regulatory pressure like the EU’s Digital Markets Act and Epic Games’ crusade in the courts, a number of contenders are emerging.
One new entrant into the increasingly competitive alternative app store space comes from an unexpected place. Comic book platform Amilova, run by developer ChibiPhoenix, has been running for the last 15 years.
The online community is devoted to comics, manga and indie artists, attracting over 1,000 artists, more than 20 million accounts and five million monthly readers.
Now it wants to move into games, starting with its web-based platform before launching a downloadable alternative marketplace. The company already has experience in the games space, having initially formed as a games studio nearly 20 years ago. Now running its own platform, it employs over 60 staff and has made over $100m in sales.
Tall order
Building a new app store to overcome existing monopolies in the mobile industry is no easy feat, of course. The Epic Games Store is one of the more recent big players to enter the space, but details of how it’s doing are thin on the ground. Along with some vague numbers about its potential downloads, revenue from third-party publishers using Epic Payments was down 18% year-over-year for the store on PC to $255m.
“The vision was there in 2010. For many reasons, it was too early.”
Adrien Bacchi
ChibiPhoenix CEO Adrien Bacchi says the team has set its sights on having games as a part of its platform for 15 years. But until now, the timing wasn’t right. In fact, it was still early days for making a website to sell and share manga and comics that creators were comfortable with.
“Amilova is the transcendence of everything that we’ve been doing for the past 15 years,” he explains. “We had in 2010, this idea that we wanted to be one of the first digital comic digital manga platforms for creators.
“A UGC platform with a membership system, and we wanted to connect it to video games. So the vision was there in 2010. For many reasons, it was too early.”
He adds: “When you were talking to artists in particular saying ‘you’re going to put your art online’, a lot of them were like, ‘oh no, you’re crazy. My work’s going to be stolen by Disney’. They are going to copy me.”
ChibiPhoenix’s vision for Amilova as a games distribution platform is to bring fans closer to an IP, and perhaps even make money off creating content around it. If users like a comic book, they may be interested in a related game. Similarly, developers could extend the universe of their game IP with comics and fan fiction. Effectively, it’s a transmedia community that aims to bring developers closer to their audience, while potentially working with other creators to “make the IP more alive”.
Community focus
As ChibiPhoenix expands into games, it plans to have a selective curation process for which titles are released on its platform, before eventually opening it up to all developers and creators.
No specific revenue share has been revealed yet, though the company plans to give developers and creators a fair revenue share for their work. It’ll also have built-in marketing and UA tools to help them get their content noticed, as well as other technical, legal and financial tools.
“If you’re the challenger what are you bringing to the table? What’s new? Why would we go there?”
Adrien Bacchi
The company hopes this play will attract not just developers, but also players. While many alternative app stores that have emerged attempt to offer lower fees and features directed at developers, giving consumers a compelling reason to break the habit and ease of using the App Store and Google Play by default is no easy task. Just ask Epic about its PC efforts.
“You have to accept being bullied by a Steam that is going to take a fortune out of you for just being there,” says Bacchi. “But if you’re the challenger, Epic, for example, what are you bringing to the table? What’s new? Why would we go there?
“And they have not found the reason. The reason is Fortnite. There are a few exclusives. It’s not deep enough for a player.
“And this is one of the lessons we are thinking about. It’s like, Epic is not making it. They made a better revenue share for creators, for the game studios, but if you make less volume, it’s not interesting.”
On alternative app stores in general, he adds: “What’s the value proposition, exactly? Is it going to be cheaper? Is it going to be more interesting? So you struggle with the value proposition. There’s nothing special. So here the question is: will transmedia and the community experience be enough to justify players going on our platform?”
Bacchi is bullish on the company’s chances of finding success with this strategy to take its share of the emerging alternative app store space. By offering incentives for developers, creators and users together, and building what he believes is a deeper, transmedia experience, the team at ChibiPhoenix will hope it’s a differentiator that sticks.
