SharkJumping

Time Warner's business unit Turner Broadcasting launched an ambitious subscription game effort today called   It currently offers 300 games, ranging from fairly recent PC games back through early  console and arcade games, for a monthly price of $14.95, and backed by a large $50M ad campaign.

The good news:  The GameTap client is about 30MB and takes up a reasonable amount of the processor cycles when it's open.  It's graphically attractive, the games are organized in logical categories and it's fairly easy to search them.  The team has done a nice job on the overall interface, providing standard keyboard alternatives to what were usually joystick-enabled games, with clear instructions and parental controls, as well as some fun features like high store registration and bonus material.  Although it's unclear from the site, one can test the system for a period of time before being asked for a credit card.  Otherwise, it's a 2 week trial followed by the monthly fee.

The bad news:  If this was the beginning of a 3 month soft launch before going "gold", I'd say GameTap is in a decent position as they continue to build the content library and test price elasticity.  But this IS the gold launch with the accompanying ad campaign, and I don't believe the service offers the type of value that will attract enough subscribers.   

The content is all over the map, with an almost needle in a haystack mentality, but missing many of the core Nintendo and Sony PS games which define great experiences of the last 10 years.   It looks like certain publishers such as Atari and Ubisoft have licensed a lot of their games while others really have only a few of them.  And where are the casual PC games?  These would be the most logical ones for this service vs offering up 10-20 year old arcade games which were reasonable in their prime, but have been far surpassed in recent years.

The download/activation times for the smaller earlier games are in the sub-one minute range, but any recent game takes essentially forever to download - so far, my two choices have both failed in their downloads after 1 hour each - they have to figure out a better way to do it since leaving this somewhat large client open solely to download games is a little bit painful.   In addition, I can't yet figure out how to save progress in games - maybe it's only in certain ones, but if I can't save, then it makes little sense to play anything except much smaller games.

Overall, I'd say that the current offering is not worth $15/month - if the company can fill out the catalog and work through some of the bugs, then I think they may have a reasonable service, but as a pretty big gamer, I wouldn't pay $15 a month for this offering vs all of the alternatives in the marketplace.