New storefront Playfield aims to solve games’ discoverability problem

Transatlantic indie studio Shark Punch raised more than a million dollars in investments earlier this year to “fix game discovery.” and this week it formally rolls out the result: Playfield, a new game storefront and discovery platform.

Playfield seems intriguing because it duplicates many popular storefront features (a tagging system, a recommendation engine, etc.) while also affording devs a hub where you can start posting updates about your game as soon as your ready to start talking about it, right on through to when you put it up for sale through Playfield.

“We’re heavily focused on integrating with the services and social networks gamers already use – we’re not building a silo,” Shark Punch CEO Jiri Kupiainen tells Gamasutra. “As developers ourselves, we feel the pain of having to update multiple storefronts, which is why we’re already pulling in social media content automatically, as well as rolling out features later that will help keep things synchronized.”

It’s a bit like Steam’s browser-based storefront, if Steam allowed you to create a store page for your game and fill it with Twitter updates and blog posts before the game was actually ready for sale — though it seems you can also sell your game in an unfinished state if you’re upfront about it.

“We’re open to games in any stage of development,” Shark Punch CEO Jiri Kupiainen tells Gamasutra. “For example, developers with games that aren’t on sale yet can still use Playfield to grow their follower base and share things with their fans. Of course, we’ll do our best to make sure gamers understand what stage the game they’re interested in is at before spending any money on it.”

Playfield has been in beta for some time, and Kupiainen says its design reflects lessons Shark Punch learned taking its heist game The Masterplan through Steam Greenlight and Early Access, then selling it across Steam and other storefront.

“We personally know which parts are tricky today. I think [our] time spent at Disney helped us understand the value of having good data – which we’ll do our best to provide to our developers,” says Kupiainen, who previously founded Finnish game company Rocket Pack — acquired by Disney in 2011. “There’s a lot of awesome games and developers out there, and we really think we can help gamers find and connect with them.”

The company seems eager to pull developers onto its platform, as Playfield is promising a standard 75/25 revenue split and a special 90/10 split until next February for any developer who signs up before the end of this year.