Time Warner (TWX) discusses its online video game business (quotes from conf call)

On April 27,2005 Time Warner (ticker: TWX) announced that it is launching an online video game business in Fall 2005 called the GameTap Broadband Entertainment Network. Below are comments about GameTap from the company's May 4, 2005 earning conference call with investors:

..GameTap…is a subscription service where you can play games on your PC, on up to two PCs in your home, and the games…are the classic games that come from all game platforms and services…..whether the game was all the way back to Sonic or PacMan, whichever platform it came out on, Nintendo versus PlayStation, you can play it on GameTap with no equipment change in your house….

We have game contracts with many game companies over 1,000 games. And it will be the place in a way..like HBO where you go to find classic games. To your question of what is our strategy or plan for games…I wouldn't link GameTap directly with…what Warner's or new line or HBO or Turner networks are doing in game licensing but what we're doing across the company is co-licensing, co-producing, in certain cases, Matrix is one of them where we've just announced a multiplayer game, where at varies stages of either full or half participation in the development and then publishing of games.

Finally, AOL and our cable company are game distributors, they provide games you can play at home….so we'll be in the games business in essentially all of those dimensions.

(Quotes are from the CCBN StreetEvents transcript.)