Inside Game Tap's brain

GameDaily Biz has an interesting interview up with Stuart Snyder, general manager of GameTap. He doesn't release subscriber numbers, saying only that the site has had 3 million unique visitors and that 60 percent of people "who are sampling" GameTap (not just who have visited the site) have subscribed. So who knows if that's 200,000 or a million. But Snyder says they plan to add 20 games a month this year, which would mean 600 games by 2007. So they're probably doing okay.

I think GameTap is a great idea, as a way of finding revenue streams and as a way to keep old-school games alive. I tried the service when it launched last fall and was only semi-impressed. The selection is good but not great; you don't realize how dominant Nintendo really was in the pre-Playstation era until you have an open buffet of old-school games -- but no Nintendo. My biggest complaint was the screen resolution was limited to 800x600, which didn't look any better than emulators, and you couldn't shrink the window to make it look like it had better resolution. I checked the FAQs, and it appears you can now change the resolution. I'll have to resubscribe sometime to see. Also, I think $15 a month for unlimited play is a fair price.

The most interesting thing to me is that GameTap has the weight of TBS and Time Warner behind it. That tells you something about video games and the revenue possibilities of game catalogs. I've been amazed at how many print and TV ads I've come across. They really want this thing to succeed.