Dropleaf
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
Some sections are still being researched1 / 4
Sections to complete：02
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Dropleaf was a Y Combinator-backed subscription service for indie PC games, pitched as Netflix for games. Founded by Zi Guo, a former Microsoft employee who had worked on HoloLens, Azure, SQL Server, and Windows, it let users play as many games as they liked for a subscription fee, with developers paid whenever their games were played. By August 2017 it had 44 games on board, including titles from TinyBuild, aiming to fix indie discoverability by rewarding quality over marketing budgets.
02 / FAILURE REASONS
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
A co-founder recalled that Dropleaf closed about two years after joining Y Combinator in 2017; the year is approximate.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
The subscription service was discontinued in 2019.
- 02
No public details of the wind-down process were disclosed.