Can Infinium Compete In The Game Console Market?

Joe Barr writes "IT Manager's Journal is running a story this morning by Robin Miller and Matt Moen on Infinium Labs, the controversial game console maker. The long promised console finally appears to be a reality, but there are serious questions about Infinium's longterm viability in the game console market. ITMJ, like Slashdot, is part of OSTG."

Comments

Hard|OCP

[mrpuffypants]

Interestingly enough, on the 14th (last Saturday) at the same time that this conference with the Infinium Labs CEO was going on, Kyle Bennett from [H]ARD|OCP was on stage at Quakecon, smashing a Phantom console with a big fucking sledgehammer.

Pictures are up at qconpics.org in the Saturday gallery. The pictures of the smashing start here. It was pretty cool to see, and Kyle promised the crowd that next week they are going to have a story up all about the internals of what the Phantom REALLY has.

I doubt it.

[OrthodonticJake]

This is everything that people are currently fighting against. With a content system that is dependant on and monitored by a third party, I can't see anyone wanting to use this for very long. Not to mention the fact that it is strongly reminiscent of a pc; if piracy ever gained a foothold, it would be over. I think it will end up as a sturdy support for your N-Gage to rest on.

Didn't sega do this?

[Zakabog]

Didn't sega do this a long time ago with there Genesis system? Wasn't there some like cable TV channel you can get and if you had it, you could select games you wanted to play and play them from the channel? I think there was some special device you needed in your genesis to play. Anyway, too lazy to look it up but I'm very sure they had something like this.

That seemed possible back then (with games being ~1 meg) but now you need to download a 5 meg executable, then like 100 megs of textures and sound files for a map. And then there's models too, I don't see how this will work unless the games are really bad. Would work much better if the 29.95 included a 100mbit connection.

Re:Didn't sega do this?

[sgumby]

i found this on the subject.
They were suppose to get this working by satellite (remember... the large dishes)

1. Information for the games sent via satellite
2. Special adapters with on-board memory connect the Sega Genesis to the cable signal coming in
3. The user selects which game he/she wants to play, via on-screen programming and the D-pad controller
4. The game is then downloaded to the respective Sega Genesis machine. This takes less than a minute.
5. The user can then play the game for as long as he/she likes as long as the unit is turned on.

FOUND IT

[MBCook]

OK, found a link. It wasn't "SegaTV", it was "The Sega Channel".

Check it out: The Sega Channel.

It ran from '94 to '98.

Re:Whoohoo!

[geekee]

"Sez you.
I say human nature is cooperation. And, hey, look, I presnted just as much evidence as you did."

Capitalism is as much about cooperation as competition. Just look at how many people must cooperate to produce a computer chip. You have everything from companies that make fab machines, fabs themselves, chip designers, packaging, etc. Capitalism forces cooperation since it's the only way to effectively compete,

If Only It Where "Competition"

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Than clearly you have not looked into the history of Infinium and it's "Phantom Game Console". This company is basically a pipe dream at best and a out-and-out fraud is more realistic. Besides, it's basically a PC in a fancy box, except you can't do word processing on it.

It's been said, many times, many ways...

[Anita Coney]

No

Re:I talked to them at E3

[whoever57]

One should be rather suspicious about them after looking at their finacials -- they spent relatively nothing on R&D. I think they spent more on their website than on console h/w and s/w development.

It's hard to see how you build a defensible business with almost no R&D! Not impossible: I think if one can develop a brand name or community that can provide an advantage, but I don't see either of these from Phantom.

Tech Specs

[Anonymous Coward]

From the Infinium website:

Phantom(TM) Game Receiver

* AMD® Athlon(TM) XP 2500+ central processing unit (CPU)
* NVIDIA® GeForce(TM) FX 5700 Ultra graphics processing unit (GPU)
* NVIDIA nForce(TM)2 Ultra 400 platform processor
* 256 MB RAM
* 40 GB local content cache
* Microsoft Windows XP® Embedded Operating System
* Dynamic, personalized user interfaces customizable for age, gender or technical expertise
* Lapboard, mouse and game pad included

* HDTV and Dolby® Digital 5.1 compatible
* Works with any consumer-standard broadband Internet Service Provider (ISP): DSL or faster

Which would certianly explain why it has "more than 33,000 games are already available".

However, isn't the minimum specs for Doom3 384MB of RAM?

DiVX all over again

[rfc1394]

And another thing - what happends when they go out of business? I can still play my Dreamcast, and even get more used games for it. Will I be able to play the "Phantom" for years afterwards, or will they cut off the supply of games when they go bankrupt or if "Phantom 2" comes out? I don't think many consumers will want to be tied to a company like that - remember the DiVX debacle.

I had forgotten that; thank you. You have it exactly right; this is DiVX all over again. (And not the one that is popular for ripping DVDs either!) And it will end up the same way as the original DiVX; part of the dustbin of history.

Re:Here's Why Infinium will succeed

[TheLoneDanger]

you can use a Nintendo 64 as an expensive DVD Player out of the box as well as a game machine

I am guessing you meant Playstation 2? Just a bit of nitpicking...