Indie Pass has some big (little) shoes to fill as it sets out to take on giant gaming subscription services by focusing strictly on the indies.
It’s a weird time for subscription services right now. The value is being questioned, maybe not so much by the consumer but definitely by the developers and publishers and platform holders. In the case of Nintendo it’s pretty simple: we have old games, there’s minimal work needed to get those to you, thanks for your money. Xbox is (or was) all in on the newest first and third party games until it nearly bankrupt them, sending them into their incredible current turmoil. PlayStation is somewhere in between, serving some new but mostly older games.
And now Indie Pass is here, hoping to cut out the black hole that’s associated with AAA endeavors and exorbitant licensing deals. It’s sole focus is to serve us a regular feed of indies, and seemingly smaller, lesser-known ones that we’ve likely never heard of before. Run by Indie.io, the alternative marketplace/promotional locale for indie games, the service delivers many of the company’s projects alongside others that sign up. It’s not a competitor to Steam or EGS, but rather a more hyper-focused place to go for indies. Currently at about $7/month (or $56/year) the full catalog is instantly available, delivered as individual downloads. There’s a basic DRM included, but only to make sure that the games are aligned with the subscription. There’s no real connected multiplayer or friend network — it’s just games, go play games, enjoy those games.
A service lives and dies by its games, and here it still feels very early in its life. There are few dozen, granted, and while I’d never played any of these before I wasn’t quite compelled by any of them. I use services for two things, looking for a specific game or scrolling to find something I may like. There is no specific game here (yet) and scrolling isn’t all that great because we’re not treated with enough information from that initial couple of seconds of screen time. We can click through, but that first image or bit of information needs to grab us.
And really, it’s just a very early, bare platform right now. I appreciate the games that ARE on it, but I think Indie Pass doesn’t quite know what it wants to be yet. It could be a great place for lesser known games, for student work, for Alphas or idea generation or discovery. It could have some adjacent aspects of those indies, information on their developers or other products or websites or social media or whatever. But it’s just a catalog right now.
That’s not a bad thing, mind you, and at 7 bucks a month it’s a fairly good price point, but it needs to keep us coming back whether to those same games or new ones. The development staff has a mountain to climb, but it may not need much to get there, if it invests itself down the right avenues.
This review is based on a subscription code provided to SideQuesting by the publisher. This video first appeared on The SideQuest Live for July 19, 2026.
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