GameTap closing Atlanta office, focusing on newer PC titles

@macnbc Hi Mac.

@buster42 Hey Buster! Glad to see you still kicking around :)
You still using GT or have you moved to another service?

@nbinney Voted you up cause you are 100% correct. Back when they had the "old" client I loved the service. It was great for my HTPC and easy and fun to use.

The web based client was just junk. Pure junk. I cancelled a month after its release, never to return.

@neibor

I see some big problems with not having customer support in the US. There is such a large time difference between Europe and the USA. This practically guarantees that it will take days to fix any problems. And how many members of your support staff are native english speakers, much less american english speakers? That will cause problems too.

And why are we reading this on Joystiq and not on the Gametap forums? Customer support has been bad for months and you can't even address these things with your paying customers? Very poor indeed.

Finally, I would not recommend buying any games from your service. It takes days to receive activation codes for games bought from Gametap. That defeats the entire purpose of downloading games. I might as well go to Best Buy to get the latest releases. And often times Best Buy is cheaper anyway.

@mogamer

We have a native English speaking team in Paris. We always have a native language speaking support team for each version of our sites (German, English, Italian, Spanish and French). Not only the support team but the whole team in Paris is an international team, this is how we built our presence in Europe and the US in the last 10 years. But, yes, you might sometimes receive an email written by a non native English speaking support agent if there is a peak in the support activity. But they all speak a good English, this is a key criteria for our recruitments, as this is the main and only common language in the company.

The time difference won't be an issue and it will be an advantage in some cases. Some support agents will work until 5 pm EST time (11 pm Paris time). And if you send an email after that time, you will have great chances to have an answer in the early morning because our support team will start to work at 4 am EST thanks to the time difference.

We will add some more information on the forum in the coming days but we have already discussed our new website version on the forums and all the advantages it will bring (catalogue, 64 bits compatibility...). But yes, we did not mentioned the new organization. I don't think that this is an interesting subject for our end users, they are more interested by what will change their experience. If this subject is raised by our end users, we will be transparent. This is common practice; you do not usually receive any information about an internal new organization from your bank, telco or TV network 

Regarding your delayed keys experience, I am sorry for your experience. It happens rarely. You have probably purchased a very sensitive game while we were attacked by some professional frauders in the last months. They use sophisticated programs to purchase a lot of keys in a short time, then cancel the transaction and resell the keys on the black market. For few sensitive games (less than 3% of the catalogue), we have to check the transactions manually before we can release the key. We are better organized now and it takes few minutes to few hours now. Once again, for 97% of our games, you will have your key immediately.

@neibor

I'd say lack of communication with your users is definitely a downside to the language gap, and has been noticeable since the day of the Metaboli puchase. Even when the old American employees remained, they were hamstrung in their community interaction by being unaware of exactly what was happening with the company they now worked for. And now that employee forum poster pyetr has left, there's been nothing but silence.

You say you've addressed this on the forum, but as far as I can tell the forums are full of nothing but confusion over why gametap has gone silent, and questions about whether you've gone out of business.

A few users have found this news article, and there's some debate about whether it's true and why the company would announce it via a news site with no mention to their own community at all, but mostly it's users who don't regularly read Joystiq and are worried about your silence and apparent closure of all operations.

@countToThree

I agree that we have not communicated well with our community in the past. But this is changing, please see this post from our new community manager on our forum : http://www.gametap.com/forum/gametap-is-changing-t38111.html

If we have communicated in this article first, it is because we had to answer Joystiq questions. We had to follow their timing. Our plan was to inform end users this week.

@neibor

Looking over the list of removed titles on the service here:
http://support.gametap.com/selfservice/template.do?id=6328
Versus the list of added titles here:
http://support.gametap.com/selfservice/template.do?id=6334

Really confirms just what I was talking about that you guys just don't "get" your target demo.

Half of the games being removed from the service (like Heroes of Might and Magic 3) are ones that would cause any significant game discussion forum online to go CRAZY about if it were released on a competitor like Steam, GOG, Impulse, etc. Meanwhile you're bringing in shovelware titles like "Supermarket Mania"? Seriously?

I think the real appeal of Gametap and its subscription model when it first started up was to bring people in with the big blockbuster stuff, but to then introduce them to quality older titles that they might have missed in the past, but since its a subscription model, the cost to try it out is practically nothing.

I used to be one of Gametap's most vocal supporters, and I wish you well in your new business, but it's definitely not one I'd ever be interested in trying out again, and I just don't see how your company is going to remain viable in the long-term.