Phantom Gaming Service Unveiled at E3

Infinium Labs debuts its Phantom Gaming Service at E3 in Los Angeles this week. In a game industry first, the company plans to provide the Phantom Gaming Service hardware free to consumers who sign a two-year contract for a basic subscription to its online gaming service at $29.95 per month. Consumers can also opt to buy the gaming "receiver" and required accessories without a commitment for $199, which will be credited back to their account over two years if they remain a subscriber.

The new service will offer subscribers a library of titles, from the top new games to old standards people want to play again and again -- and make them available any time, day or night, from the comfort of their home. The Phantom Gaming Service is slated to go live on Thursday, Nov. 18, 2004.

The Phantom Gaming Service has four key components: the service itself, the receiver hardware, a robust yet flexible distribution network and a large library of games. Titles will be streamed on demand from the service to a Phantom receiver over any broadband Internet connection, in much the same way as consumers receive on-demand satellite or cable television content. Subscribers will receive an initial library of free games, which will be supplemented with new choices each month as a part of their subscription fee. Additional titles can be rented or purchased. Premium content packages will also be made available.

The receiver for the Phantom Gaming Service can sit in any room in the home, connected to the TV and any broadband Internet connection. The receiver hardware will feature the AMD Athlon XP 2500+ central processing unit (CPU), the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra graphics processing unit (GPU) and the NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400 platform processor. The system will also feature 256MB of memory and a 40GB hard drive. In addition, the receiver will come bundled with a gamepad, a mouse and the Phantom Lapboard.

The Phantom Gaming Service will give everyone in the household a personalized game system, from the selection of what interface they want to have to an individual filing system of their favorite titles, based on their choices. The Phantom Gaming Service will also "learn" the game preferences of individual users and automatically offer titles likely to please that player.

Games owned by the subscribing household or base location will be downloaded to reside on the hard drive in the Phantom receiver. Should the hard drive approach capacity, the service will recognize this and will manage the cache in the background, invisible to the user, removing those games that were played least recently. Down the line, if the user tries to call up a removed game, the Phantom service will simply re-stream it to the hard drive.

Both multiplayer and single-player titles will be available when the system is launched, and players will be able to play over the Internet against other Phantom subscribers, as well as PC and console gamers. The service will not require that other players subscribe to the Phantom service to join in.

Promotions and special packages such as a deal on groups of titles in a particular genre will be offered monthly to subscribers to the service. The Phantom Gaming Service will be available this fall through multiple distribution channels, including leading retailers. www.phantom.net.

SOURCE Businesswire