by Cameron "Aelryn" Sorden
David Reid, VP of marketing for GameTap, was excited to spend some time at PAX talking to us about their GameTap videogame service, how it's changed in the last year, and what's in store for the future. He sure convinced me of how cool GameTap is-- I've got Baldur's Gate II downloading from my brand new Gold subscription as I write this! If you don't know what GameTap is or how cool they've gotten, keep reading.
TTH: Tell us a little about GameTap and what you’ve been up to lately.
David: GameTap launched in October of 2005—you might remember us as having 300 games and being a subscription-only service. One of the things we realized over the last six months was that we had a very large audience of people coming to GameTap who were not signing up for the subscription service and just “looked different” demographically. They looked more like the kinds of people who would go to Pogo, or MSN games, or AOL games—people who liked our marketing, liked our content, but weren’t enough of “hardcore gamers” to subscribe.
We took that as an interesting opportunity to sort of change the business. On May 31 st we launched a new site with 50 or 60 ad-supported games that anybody can come and play for fun without needing to register or subscribe. The other thing we did was add a lot of newer games to the subscription side. We have new partnerships with both Eidos and Codemasters to add larger portions of their portfolios to our service. Now you’ll see games like Overlord, which reviewed well, but a lot of people weren’t sure about spending $50 or $60 to add it to their library. We have the full game available on Gametap for significantly less. The subscription service has just been getting better and better.
TTH: Something that I’m wondering about, as an avid online gamer, is how you guys handle multiplayer on a lot of these titles. Can you play the games online with other people through gametap?
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Sam and Max is a hilarious 3D adventure game with episodic installments that can be downloaded through Gametap.
David: There are a couple of ways we do that. The first is with our “Challenge Games.” We have about 110 titles, most of them older arcade games, that you can play multiplayer over the internet. A number of our PC titles also allow play over the internet as part of the gold subscription. The other option is that many of our games which can’t be played in this way allow for two inputs. You could have two players on a keyboard or one with a keyboard and one with a gamepad.
TTH: Can we talk about your pricing schemes a bit?
David: Our first option is the free level of membership, or the green membership. You get access to 50 or 60 games, can post on our message boards, you can play multiplayer, and you can get our either our lite software or our deluxe software player.
The second option is the gold membership. The gold level of membership allows access to all 950 games in our library. It starts at $0.99 for the first month and then goes as low as $6.95 per month (if you sign up for multiple months at a time), or else $9.95 per month on a monthly basis. It’s less than what most players pay for a single MMOG, and if you consider the value of the individual titles you get with the subscription, it’s a huge value. When individual games cost between $15 and $60, getting just a few of those games starts adding up pretty quickly to the same cost as a year of GameTap.
TTH: It’s nice that you guys have a lot of the third party games and software that people want to play, but do you have any GameTap exclusive offerings?
David: It is really important to have something unique, something exclusive. For us, that’s been the episodic content, especially Sam and Max. Season one wrapped up in Spring, and season 2 will be kicking off soon as well. We also have Galactic Command, Myst Online, and American McGee’s Grimm tales, a spiritual successor to Alice which will be episodic. Every two weeks, you’ll get another 2-3 hour experience of that. You’ll be able to expect episodes on a regular schedule.
TTH: What do you have planned for Myst Online?
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Gametap offers episodic content for their massively multiplayer online game, Uru.
David: A lot of the excitement with Myst Online comes from the same reasons we were excited about Sam and Max. You have this property that’s legendary with gamers that has struggled in retail at some point. Lucasarts decided not to take Sam and Max to retail the same way Ubisoft decided not to bring Myst Online to retail. A lot of what we’ve done at gametap is look for these games that people are passionate about and that have existing communities that are keeping them alive. When we launched Myst Online: Uru in February, we had a ready fan-base that wanted to play.
We also have a Mac client for it now. Myst is a title that was born on the Mac. With the Mac universe, you’ve got a bunch of gamers who don’t always feel they have a lot of options—it’s a PC gamer’s universe. So, we felt really good about getting that game onto the Mac platform.
Another thing we decided to do with Myst online in the last few months is take the success of the episodic model we saw with Sam and Max and adapt it for Myst. If you have a game where the consumers know that on “date x” there’s going to be a batch of new content, it gives the people who play a little less the chance to catch up on the off weeks and then the faster players know right when to jump back in.
TTH: How often are you planning episodic content for that?
David: It’s been about once per month and we intend to stick with that model going forward. The second last episode for this season just came out, so the season finale for this season will be out in October.
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Lara gets a number of new looks in the Re/Visioned series on Gametap TV.
TTH: So do you offer anything else at GameTap other than the games themselves?
David: We do have GameTap TV, which is basically video programming that has a lot of 2-5 minute short videos rooted in games. We have trailers, reviews, tips and hints, and stuff like that. Then we have some lifestyle-type shows. Artists talk about the games they play, the stuff they grew up playing-- that kind of thing. All of this used to be subscription-based, but with the launch of the new site we have the GameTap channel which has a lot of our content free for anyone to watch (although some of the premium stuff is available only to subscribers—the stuff we get from Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, for example). Our Re/Visioned series has been especially popular, with many different animators presenting their unique take on Lara Croft and which aired along with our Tomb Raider Retrospective.
TTH: That sounds really cool! Well, thank you for taking some time to chat with us today at PAX.
David: Thanks for having us!
Be sure to go check GameTap out for yourselves at www.GameTap.com.
Make sure you check out all of our PAX 2007 coverage!
