AtomShockwave Announces Paid Gaming Initiative
Shockwave.com, a division of AtomShockwave Corp. began a paid content initiative on Wednesday. The company will be offering to consumers two collections of games that can be purchased for download and played offline with the Shockmachine entertainment playback device.
The two collections, Midway Classics and Shockwave.com are priced at $19.95 each or $29.95 for both, are available for download at
www.shockwave.com
The Midway Classics collection, co-developed by Shockwave.com and Digital Eclipse Software, and licensed from Midway, consists of 10 arcade games, titles like Spy Hunter, Rampage and Joust. The Shockwave.com Favorites collection is a selection of 10 online hits like Deer Hunter, and game Lab's Loop, with internally developed new games including a full version of Tamale Loco and DJ Fu Wax Attack, a music-mixing and Kung Fu fighting game.
This announcement marks the continuation of a new revenue stream for Shockwave.com, which began last month with the release of a paid premium version of the online Photo Jam, which allows users to put their digital pictures to music. According to John Welch, a spokesperson for Shockwave.com, while there was a free version available, the premium sold for $29.95 and allowed users to publish their music video on their own Web sites. He indicated that the game had already sold one quarter of the projected sales for the first year in the four weeks it has been available.
Most of the downloadable games will still be available for free on the Shockwave site, but Welch stated that the lure of ownership and being able to play the game offline would spur sales, along with value added features available only to paying customers, such as arcade settings that would allow a user to add more lives or change the difficulty setting. Included in the package are also newer versions of Tamale Loco and DJ Fu Wax Attack.
"This initiative allows us to make better games. The type of games design that went into something like Tamale Loco would not necessarily be created for an ad supported environment," said Welch.
Shockwave.com's new game collections are available for download exclusively to Shockmachine, a technology that gives consumers offline access to game titles that were previously only available via the Shockwave.com Web site. The Shockmachine has been available since August 1999, with close to seven million people having already downloaded it. The current initiative increases the number of games available for this platform.
The company indicated that it would continue to work on enhancing its e-content offerings via Shockmachine to include additional game and interactive content collections as well as linear entertainment such as short films and animations. It also stated that it would continue to add quality free games to its Web site.