ROM Rental Service To Launch

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?

Comments

Heh

[mrbaggs]

Scary thing is, I bet this will do far better than Phantom could ever hope to.

DRM?

[Nos.]

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.

Gauntlet?

[American AC in Paris]

This could be the first gauntlet into the ring

Pssh. Atari already had theirs in the ring in 1985.

Target market

[keeleysam]

I don't think this is targeted at the /. crowd, more towards the people that buy those Pac-Man joysticks at the mall because they think it will bring them back to childhood.


We, on the other hand, have grown to know and love MAME, so this isn't all that exciting, UNLESS they get some ultra-rare game that us MAME'ers don't have yet


P.S. The icon for this is a X-Arcade controller, the ULTIMATE MAME controller!

I'm in.

[black mariah]

Look, as long as it is reasonably priced and keeps me from having to deal with dumbass rom sites then I'm all for it. If they can give me the same bullshit-free service that the sorely missed mame.dk once did, then I'm going to sign up.