GameTap

» see gametap.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

gametap was a us-only subscription at launch, billed in usd to a credit card on file, streaming classic library games to broadband households in north america. close enough. in '05 i was on ttnet adsl in ankara around 1 mbps down, which was below the threshold the gametap client wanted. the catalog was also licensed for north american territories only. i would not have qualified for the credit-card billing even if the catalog had been open.

turner broadcasting had been pitching the gametap idea since '04 inside the cartoon network and adult swim business unit. the brand was supposed to be the gaming arm of adult swim and inherited some of its evening-cable irreverence. blake lewin and ricardo sanchez led the product from atlanta. launch day was october 17 '05 at $14.95 a month with a catalog of over 300 games drawn from atari and sega catalogs alongside capcom and midway licensing. the launch lineup included sonic the hedgehog and the original tomb raider. arcade ports filled out the rest of the catalog. the client was a windows download with a proprietary stream that ran the games against a remote license server.

in fairness, for about two years gametap was the dominant subscription-based classic-game streamer in the us. the catalog grew to over 1000 games by '08 with new deals for the lucasarts and sierra back catalogs. anyway, the original-game side took off in '07 with the launch of sam and max season one, an exclusive episodic adventure series developed by telltale games and streamed first on gametap. that release won a few game-of-the-year awards in the adventure category and was the single piece of original content that gave gametap real industry standing.

the recession and the broadband-distribution war hit at the same time. steam had been ramping its catalog since '04 and by '08 was selling many of the same classic titles for one-time prices under $10. the subscription frame stopped making sense for the same audience. turner announced the sale in august '08 and metaboli closed the acquisition on september 24 '08. the metaboli plan was to keep gametap as the north american brand while running its european metaboli brand on the same infrastructure. by march '09 they had ripped the standalone client and moved to a browser-plug-in setup. the user base did not move with them. the atlanta office closed on october 14 '10 and all operations shifted to paris.

the paris-run gametap kept a smaller catalog of around 700 games through '11-'14, mostly classic-library content with declining maintenance. customer support had a reputation for protracted cancellation calls that became its own complaint thread on the forums. the subscriber count was never published after the metaboli move and is generally estimated as under 100,000 by '13. in october '15 metaboli shut the service down without a press release. the gametap.com domain redirected to the metaboli european storefront for a few months and then went dark.

~ the record ~

~ the adult swim adjacency ~

the original turner pitch for gametap had it as the gaming sibling to adult swim. in those days. the brand had the same late-night cable irreverence, the marketing was placed inside adult swim time blocks, the launch event happened at a san diego comic-con booth with adult swim writers in attendance. close enough. for the first eighteen months the strategy worked, gametap had a cultural footprint inside the same demographic that watched aqua teen hunger force. once the metaboli sale closed the adult swim relationship lapsed and the brand identity flattened into a generic classic-games subscription. the late-night cable energy that had made gametap distinct in '05-'06 was gone by '09.

~ the telltale exclusive ~

sam and max season one was the proof-of-concept gametap wanted. anyway, telltale games had been struggling to find a distribution model for episodic adventure games and gametap had the audience and the willingness to fund original content. the deal ran from late '06 through the end of '07, with new episodes shipping monthly. critical reception was strong, the original content category was supposed to be the differentiator going forward. when the metaboli acquisition went through the original-content budget was cut and telltale moved its next titles to direct sales (close enough).

~ the long tail ~

metaboli kept gametap alive in name through '15, the actual product was running on minimal staffing out of the paris office. forums tracking abandonware coverage had largely moved on by '12 since steam and gog covered most of the same classic library legally, with emulator distributions handling the rest. the october '15 shutdown happened without coverage in the english-language gaming press. the domain went dark, the streaming client was pulled from active distribution, and the licensed catalog reverted to whoever had originally held the rights. inside the larger arc of classic-game subscriptions, gametap was the first serious attempt at the model and the first to fail under steam's direct-sales pressure.

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