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More ApeXtreme Info
Hack Jandy writes "AnandTech has some pretty interesting follow up information to last week's sneak peek and discussion concerning VIA's attempt to penetrate the console market. By the looks of it, the S3 DeltaChrome GPU is horribly incapable of making VIA/Apex a formidable gaming console." More on vaporware at CES: Bob Gortician points to this "interesting, if terse, piece on the Phantom game console's debut..."
Why would someone go to such elaborate measures and great expense(putting together a prototype, sending exhibitors to CES, et al.) just to fool... whom? If it *isn't* a hoax, how can they possibly compete against heavy hitters like MS and Sony? I don't get it, what's it all about?
Why is another company with relatively little financial base compared to Sony and Microsoft trying to enter the console market?
Nintendo is already on its way out to becoming a software-only company like Sega was. Microsoft is doing reasonably well in the US, but flopping in Japan and Europe. Sony dominates in all three areas, because they've been the standard since the PS1 -- which they're still backwards compatible with, by the way.
With days of software being unportable due to heavy use of assembly language being a thing of the far past, and games being more modular, people are going to do what they do in the business world and bet on the winner.
The winner? Sony. They're too big, and most likely can't be dethroned. They're also in bed with Linux, which is a good thing. In Japan, they released a TIVO/DVD-R/PS2 combo, and are on their way to creating and dominating with a single living room device.
Really, they should just give up. I still have a P-166 with an S3 'Da Vinci' Virge, and for it's purposes it's worked great. However, they've been out of the graphics market for far too long...so unless they can grab some engineers from Nvidia or ATI, I don't see them rolling out anything better in a performance/cost ratio. If they had a lot of money, I could see them pulling back into serious competition, but it would require some serious investment and the understanding that there wouldn't be much payback. Then again, that's on eof the reasons the ApeXtreme is so cheap, the POS graphics card (and processor...and sound...etc etc). They must be able to churn out their components really cheaply for the entire setup to be $399. (especially because it's a PC game running setup, so no licensing profits, the entire profit is from the console sale itself which is counter-intuitive in that market) I don't think it's going to last, and on their next tax filing, the ApeXtreme development is going to be labeled 'capital loss' or something to that effect.
Kind of a tangent, but I've had good experiences with Apex equipment. I've had a few Apex DVD players, I have an Apex TV, and my girlfriend has an Apex TV as well. All for great prices.
:P
I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but I just wanted to say that they make some quality stuff in my experience- a lot of people might be misled by their low prices. They're not Aiwa... their stuff seems to hold up well.
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Let me explain. Many great games are being ported to Linux, and blockbusters are being announced on a practically weekly basis. With a GNU/Debian Linux based gaming system, all the required infrastructure for grabbing game updates and patches would be in place with apt-get. Of course, most consoles aren't going to be equipped with a keyboard, but it is easy to imagine something like dselect being extended with an SVGAlib written wrapper that would allow an inexperienced games console user to 'type' in using an onscreen keyboard commands like 'apt-get update nethack', or 'apt-get install xbill'. Of course access charges to such a service would be completely free. This could be the thing that really blows Microsoft and Xbox Live! out of the water.
What I want to know is...has anyone tried a Linux-based games console before? Just take some commodity hardware, package Linux, and let the community do the rest? If not, it's high time. I think it would be a massive success. If only VA Linux was still in the Linux hardware game, they could potentially manufacture these boxes and provide support too.
Let's see, it's vaporware except for a big, fairly ugly box which has never been turned on, it's sponsored by a guy whose known for getting capital for loser projects, it's competing against three other boxes which are still going strong in sales...maybe the Phantom is exactly what it claims to be...nothing. A ghost box.
Besides, Sony will probably have a working prototype of PS3 before it's even released, by which time it'll have no chance, just like Dreamcast.
So my first thought was "Forget the hardware, where are the games?". Turns out the ApeXtreme is designed to run PC games via special "installer scripts". In other words, it's just like buying a PC to play games...only you don't get any of the benefits of actually owning a PC.
Riiiight.
The way the console world works is that you buy one piece of hardware and get 3-5 years of games out of it. If you keep the console around, you can still play those games many years later(raise your hand if you still have an NES/C64/etc). You never have to deal with patches, hardware upgrades, incompatibility, or any of the other woes of the PC. The downside is that you have a limited feature set and no option to upgrade the hardware and remain on the same platform. Since the hardware is fixed, the life and death of the various consoles are determined solely by the choice of games.
Anyone who tells you that hardware is anything more than a tertiary concern in the console market does not know what they are talking about
Consider, for instance, the success of the NES against the Sega Genesis, or the utter failure of the Atari Jaguar and countless others like it. Sony took control of the console market by being easier for third party licensees to work with than Nintendo or Sega.
Contrast this with the PC game market, in which the hardware is king. PC gaming web sites spend lots of time talking about hardware, and game developers write games so that future hardware will be able to take full advantage of them. Games themselves are generally of lower quality upon release than their console brethren, and it's not uncommon for it to take many patches to iron out all the problems. The upside of this is that patches will often improve the game as well as fix bugs.
Lower quality combined with the ever-increasing cost of hardware upgrades have caused the game industry to decline somewhat in the past few years. Successful PC games will likely have a console port, but the reverse is less often true.
Into this scenario comes VIA, proposing to combine the worst aspects of a console(non-upgradability, limited functionality) with the worst aspects of the PC game market(low quality, patches, quick obsolescence). Couple this with the fact that for the price of this console you can upgrade your CPU and video card anyway, and I can't see this as anything other than a disaster waiting to happen. There is absolutely no reason to buy this system.
[1] When I say "PC game market", I mean games like Warcraft and Half-Life, not Snood and its ilk.
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S3's latest line of GPU's is utter crap by comparison to anything from ATI or Nvidia, even at similar prices. The flagship is like a geforce 2 Ti but less stable. It won't even run a lot of directX 8.1 games. Geez, by now the radeon 9600 GPU chip is cheap to make and under $40 wholesale. Why didn't they use that to give their $300 console some good performance?
Repeal the DMCA!
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It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
According to this article Apex already beat Sony on their own turf by selling more DVD players in the US than any other manufacturer.
Personaly, I think the Apextreme box would make a fine HTPC (like a frontend to MythTV).
- Competing directly in the retail market against Sony and MS would be difficult in any case.
- Phantom relys on content delivery over the network rather than on disks. (Why would any games store want to sell one of these things, they'd get no customers coming in to buy more games like they do with XBox or PS?)
It would make a lot of sense for them to partner with cable companies and the option of an inbuild cable modem could make it an attractive "drop in" package to some.Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
While you may be one of the sad, sad fans of the Dreamcast, you have forgotten a major reason for Sega exiting the hardware business.
The hardware business is expensive, and Sega ran out of money. That's all there is to it, no 'sony lied about sega' or 'sony slept with segas wife' or any other crap. After the horrible debacle that started with the 32X and SegaCD, they never really got their footing back. The 32X was a financial disaster, probably second only to the ET cartridges made by Atari. The Sega Saturn never really took hold and the 3d hardware was inadequate (not to mention seriously lacking in developer support). I mean, come on, it couldn't even do transparencies. That's sad. Even the 2d games on the Saturn had to use horrible cross-hatching from the 8 bit nintendo days (since the snes could do hardware transparencies and blending).
After the low sales of the Saturn and waning developer support, the Dreamcast was a last-ditch effort to stay in the market. It sold well in Japan but it was hard to find games for. Release dates kept getting pushed further back every week. Meanwhile Sony had a viable alternative with a growing library of hits. Namco and other big hitters were in Sony's pocket. The rest, as they say, was history. Sega's wisest decision was to get out of the hardware business and stick with what they've always done best: making games.
Now, you can get Sega games for multiple platforms. Sega just has to develop games and not worry about who wins or who loses the hardware wars. Their fate was probably ultimately unavoidable, and I'm glad they're still making fun games.