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Indrema Dead in 30 Days?
missingmatterboy writes "Red Herring has an article on the current state of John Gildred's Indrema, and it doesn't look great. Without an investment in the next month or so, only the prototype will ever get finished, much less any completed units." Lots of lofty ideas, but you can only produce vapor for so long before exposing your soft fleshy belly. It sure looked like it could have been something tho.
Dreamcast died and it was an excellent machine.
Indrema was a brand new company trying to break into the industry. Its only major advantage over the competition was the linux OS. And (this isn't a flame, but I'm sure it'll be taken as one) having a linux OS doesn't make the console more desirable than the others. Its the developers, the games, and the popularity. The console world is a lot different than the PC world.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Other things that've been responsible for spoiling the variety and quality of games:
There's always something out there for the less talented, formulaic game designers to latch on to and copy. If it wasn't cloning 3D first-person shooters, it would be cloning 2D side-scrolling platform games or 2D real-time strategy games or...
But from the start I did not think that Indrema had a good chance. Being "linux-based" isn't a magic pill to get things popular. Sure it has a lot of cool features, but a large part of what they were relying on was the hype surrounding linux. On a game console, this doesn't buy them all that much functionality wise. It may be different if there was a large number of linux based video games, but there aren't. They were trying to enter a market deeply entrenched by the likes of Sony and Nintendo. A very necessary resource to have a chance of breaking into that market would involve really deep pockets, like Microsoft has. Indrema couldn't afford to lose as much money as they would need on the console itself yet, no way they could afford a good marketing campaign. Now they are down to the hope of last minute investors in a economy that is going downhill. Maybe they could have done something much earlier, if they timed it just right, when the media was super-hyping linux, economy was booming, and there were many investors ready to throw money at all things computer based, but even then I would think they would have a snowball's chance in hell of success. Too bad, it would've been nice to have been proved wrong. They did seem to be getting a quality product developed that would've been techincally superior to most other things out there, but as we have seen many times before, quality isn't the only factor...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
"It sure looked like it could have been something tho."
A console by a company with no reputation, no serious financial backers, no experience, and no large parent firm, and you thought it could have been something? Why? Because it ran Linux? Linux was the only thing Indrema ever had going for them, because it was a great buzzword.
If anything, the Linux community should be glad to see Indrema go. People who use Linux to fund their cash-burning startups and never produce anything do little to advance the cause.
Bravo for the idea, and I would've LOVED to see the indrema happen, but the chips were stacked against them from the beginning.
"...but you can only produce vapor for so long before exposing your soft fleshy belly."
Maybe they should have used this on the marketing brochures.
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