Gamasutra - Feature - "Telltale Tells All (Pt. 2) - Hit By the Business End of the Rabbity-Thing"


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By Frank Cifaldi
[Author's Bio]
Gamasutra
July 31, 2006

Telltale Tells All (Pt. 2) - Hit By the Business End of the Rabbity-Thing

Introduction
Fans Come First
Gametap
Cost of Living

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Telltale Tells All (Pt. 2) - Hit By the Business End of the Rabbity-Thing

GS: So David Reid, from Gametap! Hello!

David Reid: Hi!

GS: You haven't done any episodic content before Sam & Max that I know of.

DR: That's right, this will be our first.

GS: How are you marketing this differently? Are you displaying it on the menu prominently, or…?

DR: Oh, definitely. Like Dan said it's a subscription-based business. We look at HBO as a model for our success, something where there's hits that anchor people to the network, and today that's a legacy thing like a Crazy Taxi or a Prince of Persia or a Street Fighter, but in order to really win with gamers you have to have fresh, new, exclusive content of some sort that gets people excited about coming to you.

It's great to have, you know, this bulk of things that people can look to while they're waiting for the next installment of something new, but like HBO has its Sopranos and things like that, we need things like Sam & Max that we rely on to be the hits that anchor people and keep them on the network.

I come from Xbox, and when we launched Xbox 360 we got behind our exclusive platform games and anchored our market there. We will be doing the same thing this holiday with things like Sam & Max. We will be doing broad, platform-based marketing around Gametap, but we will also do very precise marketing around these titles like Sam & Max, and things we haven't announced yet that will resonate with gamers that it's not just about Gametap as a platform, it's about critically-acclaimed content that I'm not going to find at retail.

GS: Is your audience limited by the hardware? I can't relax on my couch in front of the TV and log in to Gametap, is this causing you to miss out on a large segment of the audience you're aiming at?

DR: I think it's exactly the reverse. If you think about the fact that this holiday you're going to have people who are clamoring to try to buy a PlayStation 3 at $599, you know, Gametap works on the console you already own, broadband PC, that's in 70%+ of the homes at this point.

I think we're in a much better place than some of the folks in the console space to get games and get hardware out into the hands of gamers and people looking for this content.

Next: Cost of Living