History
GameTap launched on 17 October 2005 with over 300 games and has grown to over 1,000. The service was the idea of Turner employee Blake Lewin. The initial list of game licensees included Activision, Atari, Intellivision Lives!, Midway, Namco, Sega, and Taito. Since its inception, more companies have licensed their software, including: Eidos Interactive, G-Mode, Ubisoft, Codemasters, Vivendi Games, Konami, Electronic Arts, Capcom, Take-Two Interactive, Interplay and SNK Playmore.
On May 1, 2007, GameTap revised its business model to utilize three different service levels: Visitor, Green, and Gold. The Visitor and Green levels were free, had access to a limited selection of games, and were supported by advertising. Green members registered with the site and received access to a few more games. Gold members were essentially identical to paid subscribers as before.
On November 29, 2007, GameTap announced that on December 11 of the same year, over 70 games would be removed from their catalog, many of them Electronic Arts or Interplay titles, likely due to expiration of the two-year licensing agreement with those companies.
On January 10, 2008 a GameTap staff member announced the return of the Humongous Games license which restored popular games such as the likes of Putt Putt and Pajama Sam back to the library.
On August 6, 2008, Turner Broadcasting announced that they were looking to sell GameTap. On September 24, 2008, Time Warner sold the service to Paris-based Metaboli. Turner continued to handle GameTap's operations during the transition period, which lasted until 2009. After the transition, the service became available to non-US/Canadian residents.
On March 31, 2009, GameTap Player is replaced by the plug-in after saying goodbyes to their players, GameTap's business model was again changed. The GameTap Player was changed into a GameTap Plug-In; the service is now handled through the website. The subscription levels were changed to Free Pack (selected handful of games for free), a new Classic Pack (reduced-price version of the full service which does not include Windows games), and Premium Pack (the Gold membership). However, due to technical issues, many features offered previously were disabled during the migration. Users with 64-bit versions of Windows can only play games that are marked as 64-bit compatible. GameTap is currently working on encrypting the rest of their Windows catalog with Yummy encryption to make them 64-bit compatible.
On October 14, 2010, the American office of Metaboli was shut down and all operations moved to Paris thus cutting all ties with original Turner employees.
Read more about this topic: GameTap
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.”
—G.M. (George Macaulay)
“Indeed, the Englishman’s history of New England commences only when it ceases to be New France.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
““And now this is the way in which the history of your former life has reached my ears!” As he said this he held out in his hand the fatal letter.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)