I used to love GameTap. A few months ago, I would have heartily recommended it to friends and family. Shelling out a mere $60 a year in order to play a huge assortment of retro games, along with a growing library of modern PC games? A single entry fee in order to try out games I’m interested in but might never actually buy (e.g. Far Cry, the new Tomb Raiders, Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened)? Count me in!
Then, the incident happened.
Metaboli acquired GameTap. That, in and of itself, was not a bad thing. Metaboli had infrastructure in Europe and with the acquisition came the possibility of an even greater games library with the two services merging.
But a mistake was made – a big mistake. Prior to approximately a month and a half ago, GameTap had a desktop client. You downloaded and launched games from within the client, which (for me) always worked flawlessly. The client also allowed for the setting of such things as subaccounts, where games were stored, and the setting of a variety of playlists (favorites, RTSs I like, etc).
When Metaboli took over GameTap, they forced the desktop client out of existence and instituted a web-based plugin instead. My guess is that this was to streamline operations; Metaboli’s European market was already using a browser plugin and supporting the old GameTap client must have seemed like a waste of money.
But the first few months of the web-based plugin have been disastrous. GameTap’s forum have been blazing since the transition and, a little insultingly, the GameTap site now has “BETA” emblazoned on the front of it. It feels a bit like subscribers got the shaft. Sure, people who just want to play games for free have a slightly easier initial experience, with no client to download. But those of us that pay money to access the entire catalog? We have to deal with a buggy web plugin that deleted our old save games, refuses to download new games half the time, and sometimes (for seemingly no reproducible reason) will refuse to load. Additionally, the browser plugin has lost several features that the desktop client had, including fullscreen play of old console games, which are now forced into a tiny flash window in your browser.
I still like the games that GameTap offers. I still like the intention behind the service. But the transition from desktop client to browser-based plugin has been infuriating. For a good several weeks of my paid subscription, I was unable to reliably play games. I am still wary about accessing the website; every day is a coin flip on whether or not I’ll be able to access my old saves or download new games.
I mentioned to Katie yesterday that I might cancel my subscription. But because I have the yearly package, that doesn’t expire until March of next year. Maybe, by then, GameTap will have finally sorted through this debacle.
Currently, though, I could not honestly recommend the service to anyone, which is a shame.