Enticing Business Partners

Here are Phantom's main advantages to game developers:

The Man with the Plan
So who's behind the Phantom? The company CEO is Tim Roberts, an entrepreneur who retired at 28 when his company SAVVIS made its initial public stock offering in 2000. And what does SAVVIS do? Its main business is providing network services, such as secure virtual private networks, to major businesses.
  • Copyright protection: You can already download games from the Web, of course, but Infinium Labs would have tighter control over what a gamer downloads and what the gamer does with the download. In other words, the VPGN set-up, the encryption scheme, the lack of a CD-ROM drive, etc. will make it much harder for people to steal games. And this should attract game developers who don't want to put their games up on the Internet, where they're prime targets for pirates.

  • Low risk publishing: With the Phantom set-up, game developers can offer a game to console gamers without shelling out the cash to actually put discs on store shelves. If the developer has already created the game, they basically have nothing to lose offering it to Phantom owners.

So what's the downside? We'll get into that in the next section.