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If you cast your mind back to last year, you may remember Piko Interactive launching a failed Kickstarter for a project called Bleem.net, named after the famous PS1 emulator from the early 2000s for the Sega Dreamcast.
Pitched as "the ultimate retro platform", the idea for Bleem.net was for it to act as an all-encompassing digital game marketplace where players could purchase games both physically and digitally (DRM-free), buy "a variety of merchandise, toys, and comics," and access video games and "hundreds of hours of animated and live-action series" on demand. However, after the campaign went live, funding fell far short of expectations, leading Piko Interactive's founder, Eli Galindo, to announce that he had decided to split the animation and comic parts of the service into separate projects, distinct from the more traditional gaming elements.
Since then, we'd admittedly not heard much from Piko Interactive about its next steps for Bleem.net, but that all changed last week, when the company announced what seems to be a new take on the idea, under the name Bleemcast!.
Bleemcast! is described as a "Netflix-style service for retro games", and is being developed for iOS and Android devices. It is pitched as a new gaming service "designed to give players instant access to a growing library of retro games wherever they go... putting a library of classic games directly on the player's phone."
As the announcement states, a beta is now live, with unsubscribed players being able to experience a rotating library of games every month (with ads).
Those who subscribe, meanwhile, can get an ad-filled or ad-free experience depending on the tier, with the subscription unlocking all the games being offered as part of the service, rather than having to wait each month for new games. These can be played immediately on their phone or can be "cast" to a monitor of their choosing, where they can use their phone as a controller.
Right now, only Piko titles are included, but the company has plans to get other IP holders and publishers involved, with "the long-term goal" being to build the service into "a go-to destination for retro gaming."
Given the existence of Antstream Arcade, which has already sort of cornered the market on being "the Netflix of retro gaming" and is available for a long list of consoles and devices, I can't exactly see this catching on, but I'm happy, as always, to be proven wrong.