Bleem! Brand revived as a Digital Games Marketplace

Deleted User · Jan 13, 2021

Piko Interactive has acquired the Bleem! Brand name from David Herpolsheimer, former president of the Bleem company.
Bleem! was a commercial Playstation emulator released by the Bleem Company in 1999 for PC and Dreamcast.
Now, Piko is launching an online digital marketplace called Bleem! Powered.
Bleem Powered represents commercial preservation of older titles from now defunct platforms.
Necessary software to make the game run as intended will be included.
Confirmed hardware are Nintendo Entertainment System, SNES, Sega Genesis, the Game Boy line, TurboGrafx-16, PS One.
There are plans for more platforms to be included in the future.
Third party publishers will be able to use the custom wrapper through publisher partnerships.
This will allow them to use the wrapper on their own Bleem Powered releases or when publishing on Steam or GoG.
This wrapper is not required for publishers to publish game of the Bleem Marketplace.

“We will be making available titles on the Bleem Marketplace that we would never release on Steam or Good Old Games [GoG].
Some of these releases will be available exclusively on our new storefront.
We are also excited to work with independent and homebrew developers in monetizing their releases and reaching new fans.”

Source:https://pikointeractive.com/making-return-as-a-digital-games-mark/

Xzi · Jan 13, 2021

Finally someone is doing something interesting with a digital download platform on PC, instead of just trying to compete with Steam by releasing an inferior version of it. Looking forward to seeing what games end up on this, and hopefully it finds its fair share of success.

Bladexdsl · Jan 13, 2021

i must be reading it wrong but it sounds like they are going to sell roms? welp we'll see how long they last

get your dmca hammer ready nintendo.

Deleted User · Jan 13, 2021

Bladexdsl said:
i must be reading it wrong but it sounds like they are going to sell roms? welp we'll see how long they last

get your dmca hammer ready nintendo.

nah, they probably will sell roms from lesser publishers, kinda like how Data East officially licensed roms for Reproduction cartridges, it also talks about homebrew

gamesquest1 · Jan 13, 2021

Bladexdsl said:
i must be reading it wrong but it sounds like they are going to sell roms? welp we'll see how long they last

get your dmca hammer ready nintendo.

they do say they will be publishing games from third parties, essentially just providing an emulator wrapper so third party developers and publishers can sell their back catalogue without having to do any of the work involved in producing and/or maintaining the emulator software themselves, I doubt places like capcom or other big publishers would ever bite (unless it really took off and they wrangled a really good deal with practically no fees), but i'm sure there are many smaller devs who have a fairly sizeable collection of retro games in their back catalogue with no real way of capitalising off them, if you have 50 titles under your belt and they aren't doing anything to make money why not sell them under the bleep marketplace and even if its only 1 sale a month its better than nothing

funny enough this is what I was suggesting retroarch should be doing, simply offering their emulator as a platform for publishers to resell their own games, while us more tech savvy people would probably scoff at the idea of paying for a 1mb rom to play I know many people who would prefer to be able to find a simple standalone app that just works as a classic game on their mobile than mess around finding an emulator that actually just works yeah there is a ton of BS emulators on the play store that barely function or come with ad pop ups and notification spam etc

FAST6191 · Jan 13, 2021

That is a curious one, though I am more surprised he hung onto the Bleem name for all these years.

The service as described is not really doing anything for me but hope it gets something interesting.

Deleted member 42501 · Jan 15, 2021

Wonder if the wrapper is actually going to spruce up the graphics like OG Bleem did because that would be a good point of sale.

The Real Jdbye · Jan 15, 2021

But why? Why Bleem? Why dig up that grave?

gamesquest1 · Jan 15, 2021

The Real Jdbye said:
But why? Why Bleem? Why dig up that grave?

maybe symbolic afaik bleem was the only emulator that ever went to court and won against Sony to prove what they were doing was totally legal, unfortunately the legal system being what it is they couldn't continue operating after the court case as it wrecked them financially, but non the less for someone looking to setup a platform that uses emulators I think its nice that the bleem name gets to live on for their effort to stand up to a huge corporation, hopefully the original owner got a nice little pay check for the name.

FAST6191 · Jan 15, 2021

The Real Jdbye said:
But why? Why Bleem? Why dig up that grave?

Marginal name recognition (we got this thread after all where the 9000 other attempts at such shops usually go unnoticed unless they have a deal going on), short and sweet word that is not actually a word (thus more readily trademarked) and said recognition also not really poisoned (not like the original Bleem did anything bad, just got on the wrong side of Sony's bigger lawyer budget).
I can see making a token sum, especially if it is a matter of signing assets over for a token sum. I mean grabbing domain, trademarks, creating logos, doing registered business setup... time and money to set those all up such that there are perks to buying one off the shelf even without said name recognition -- several business types I deal with have fairly bland/generic company names on tick over in case they need to spin it up for some venture with the added perk that they also appear to have been around for years if someone does look things up.

Lv44ES_Burner · Jan 15, 2021

After reading this, I need a fucking drink.

Bleem! Brand revived as a Digital Games Marketplace

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