It’s a little hard to have complete faith in Timothy Roberts. After all, he was one of the co-founders and the CEO of Infinium Labs, the company that announced plans to release a revolutionary new gaming platform, Phantom, back in 2002. Ultimately the PC-based Phantom ‘console’ and the gaming on demand service it promised to deliver turned out to be vaporware.
Seven years later and Roberts is preparing to launch a new digital distribution network, GameStreamer. We recently met with Roberts, now GameStreamer CEO, and David Hunter, the company’s VP of business development Europe, to discuss their new venture, what really went wrong with Phantom, and to find out why we should have faith that history isn’t about to repeat itself.
Roberts describes GameStreamer as a “game channel provider” for high traffic websites, social portals, ISPs, entertainment firms, and even the likes of Valve and the platform holders. It creates customisable online stores for its partners and offers them access to its game portal, featuring an initial library of 3,500 titles, to sell to their customers via streaming or download. Partners receive a percentage of all game sales, subscription and advertising revenues. “We provide the technology, infrastructure, management, network, AAA content and upgrades. You provide the traffic,” reads GameStreamer’s site.
The company’s game portal is set to be beta tested in June before the commercial launch of nine partner stores on July 1, and Roberts says it will offer an increasingly large supply of premium and casual content because there’s no admission price for developers or publishers wanting to distribute their titles via GameStreamer.
“What GameStreamer allows you to do is real time publish, protect and activate your games,” says Roberts, explaining that an extranet site will enable content providers to upload their titles, choose a licensing model, view performance statistics and manage updates and patches.
GameStreamer offers free DRM through Sony DADC SecuROM, which Hunter says will help indies that usually can't afford to pay for such protection. “We can get a title wrapped, approved and distributed to stores within 72 hours.”
Roberts also claims that having teamed up with Savvis, “the company that owns one third of the internet,” GameStreamer “can support millions of downloads and prove it and the competition can’t… Where other catalogues only have thousands of games, we’ll have tens of thousands of games. On the indie and casual side we’ve already got more than we expected. We have 135 partners lined up. We haven’t had a ‘no’ yet from publishers. Out of the top 20 publishers we have more than ten [on board].” Titles already confirmed include World Of Goo, Age Of Conan and Braid.
“Our true competitors today are Oberon Games, but they’re strictly focused on casual content, and Metaboli,” says Roberts. “I think that companies like Valve and Big Fish Games, most people would put them in a box and say that they’re competitors to us. Truly, they’re [potential] partners for us, so it’s just [about] changing them from building themselves to outsourcing.” Roberts also says that Xbox Live Marketplace and the PlayStation Store “still need a tremendous amount of work,” and that he hopes GameStreamer can one day “be the provider” of Microsoft’s and Sony’s game stores.
Looking ahead, Roberts predicts a shift in gaming from the bedroom to the living room, and suggests that consoles will lose much of their current market share as PC gaming spreads its wings to a greater number of platforms, echoing sentiments expressed recently by Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot. He says that GameStreamer’s primed to capitalise on this shift, having taken an agnostic approach to its business.
“I think that if everybody doesn’t move into online distribution, for every media, they’re going to be out of business in the next five years. We’re already working with a lot of cable set top box manufacturers and I think that what you’re going to see is these devices turn into open development communities. You can pretty much go in and take their SDK and write any service application you want to and capture their audience.”
With the prices of DVRs, cable converter boxes and such devices falling and the ability to put PC games on them “broadening every day,” Roberts says the costs are “much lower for a developer to write a game [only] for PC and to know that they’ve got a wider audience and [don’t] have to worry about porting it to multiple devices.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly there’s no mention of Phantom, which promised so much, on the exec's listing on GameStreamer’s management team page, but it certainly hasn’t been forgotten elsewhere, as this recent April Fool’s Day joke attests. It heralds the imminent release of Phantom with a launch lineup highlighted by Duke Nukem Forever, itself a product that may well never see the light of day. So why didn’t Phantom ever make it to market?