I would SO tap that game.

David Reid, VP of marketing for GameTap, was excited to spend some time at PAX talking to Ten Ton Hammer 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.

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.

Read more, right here at Ten Ton Hammer.