Gamers Thrilled: AOL Unveils a New Service, BigDownload.com

AOL launched yesterday BigDownload.com, a free video game download site intended for passionate PC gamers.

The service which was created by AOL Games and sister company Weblogs Inc., comes with a generous offering exceeding 400 game downloads, game trailers and demos, plus game-related news and reviews from Weblogs' Joystiq.com blog.

Barbara Dybwad, senior producer at Weblogs explains why they’ve come up with this project since AOL already treats its customers with a download service through its GameDaily site, "BigDownload gives us the opportunity to go super-niche with PC gaming."

The new service seems to be developed with a far more ranging focus. Compared to GameDaily which mainly deals with the top 25 games releases during the year, "we're going to go way beyond that to cover any of the titles that are going to be released in the space," adds Dybwad. As the title suggests gamers will have plenty to look forward to (about 50 to 100 new games monthly), plus "indie" titles coming directly from developers.

Besides standard display units and sponsored text links, AOL Games market strategy with respect to this new site will include custom sponsorships around site features such as the download "button" and also home page roadblock ads for a given campaign. At this time the service has big names like LendingTree.com, Lexus, Subaru and Kroger appearing as advertisers.

Referring to this aspect Dybwad commented - "We're not trying to bring in anyone for free and spring a subscription model on them. This is driven by an ad model."