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ROM Rental Service To Launch

Posted by Zonk on from the beginning-of-the-end dept.

Neon Spiral Injector writes "Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. (TBS, Inc.), a Time Warner company, just put up a website for their new GameTap service. It appears to be a flatrate, all-you-can-play program that will allow ROMs to be downloaded to a PC and run through their software. Today's press release says that there are 17 publishers onboard with nearly 1000 games (300 available at launch)." This could be the first gauntlet into the ring a major media company. Who will be the next into the industry?

3 of 70 comments (clear)

  1. DRM? by Nos. · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I wonder what sort of techniques they're going to incorporate to stop people from sharing/keeping the games and "programming" that are available. I'm guessing someone will come out with a freeware client and we'll start seeing torrents of their software before too long.

  2. Short on details... by Reignking · · Score: 2, Interesting

    As we've all figured out, this web site so far is high on hype and low on details.

    I find it quite interesting that "TBS" is doing this, though -- why them? This just doesn't sound like something TBS should or would be getting into. I mean, this is the company and station the bring you the Braves and The Real Gilligan's Island.

    As a Time Warner company, wouldn't this have made sense as part of something else, maybe that albatross named AOL?

    --
    One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
  3. Re:Bad emulators? by GameNutz · · Score: 2, Interesting

    FCOL. Doesn't anyone read anymore? Nowhere in that press release did they state they were writing emulators. Client side software to run host based games is not emulation. This will, most likely, be a client/server based model that had a portion of the execution always sitting on the server (and this demands that you have broadband.) Almost every online game today that works across dialup is doing all of the render/execution locally so the amount of bits that need to be pumped are smaller. This means that the client side won't do anything without being connected to the server. This helps stop piracy and mandates that you have to be connected to their service to play said games.

    This is not new in the computer world but is "newer" in the games world.