What once was lost is now found again.
AtGames Holding Ltd. acquired PC-game distribution website GameFly Digital in April, and now the company is relaunching the product under its original Direct2Drive name. The GameFly Digital website will go offline tonight, and AtGames will work through the evening to bring it back online under the Direct2Drive branding. While Half-Life developer Valve dominates the PC-gaming business with its Steam distribution client, companies like GOG.com and Green Man Gaming are surviving in their own niches.
Direct2Drive general manager Ed Lin wants to do the same thing with his service.
“Since we acquired GameFly Digital, we’ve worked feverishly to get the [new] site up,” he said. “It’s pretty exciting for us.”
Direct2Drive began in 2004 as gaming news website IGN’s distribution service. In 2011, the rent-by-mail company GameFly acquired Direct2Drive to bolster its online business. Since then, GameFly has pulled back on many of its more ambitious efforts (which also included a publishing program), and this led to AtGames stepping in to acquire GameFly Digital.
Now, it is up to AtGames to help this PC gaming site turn into something that gamers want to go to for their software.
“Our vision for the new Direct2Drive is to create the best destination, both for gamers to find their favorite titles and for publishers to showcase their lineups,” said Lin. “We will bring a retail-quality experience to the digital world with the best incentives and events that gamers both expect and deserve.”
Surprisingly, Lin said that it wasn’t always a guarantee that AtGames would go back to the Direct2Drive name.
“It was always up for debate,” he said. “When we made the acquisition, we started talking about what we wanted to do with it. We started playing around with calling it something different, but the space is crowded with competitors like GOG.com and Green Man Gaming — when we started doing research, Direct2Drive just kept popping back up. That heritage just makes a lot of sense.”
And Lin is not just bringing back the name. The company wants to stick closely to the look and feel of the Direct2Drive that you remember.
“Direct2Drive is always going to have that great nostalgia,” said Link. “That’s why we wanted to bring back the branding. In terms of the logo, we’re actually going to keep it exactly the same because it has a lot of cachet to it.”