Slashdot Mirror
Startup Aims For $99, Android-Powered TV Game Console
rodrigoandrade writes "Ouya is a new Android-based home console that aims to bring to the living room the $0.99 games business model that has worked so well for Apple. The device 'will allow developers to easily create and sell their games and be fully “hackable” — anyone will be able to pull the machine apart and tinker with it to their heart’s content.' They're planning on shipping by March 2013. Admittedly, it's vaporware so far, but it could turn the industry on its head, effectively putting an end to the things we all hate about modern console gaming ($60 games, DLC, DRM, endless sequels, movie tie-ins, etc.)"
In France, where almost all domestic broadband is "triple play" (phone, TV and Internet), at least two of the major ISPs offers gaming as part of the functionality of their latest glorified router package. You can't get much easier to install than "It's already there", and the ISPs already have a distribution model that they use to sell view-on-demand video.
Virtually serving coffee
The $.99 business model only works for ios devs because there are millions of devices in the wild. How many do they plan to sell? It's not like standard android apps blow up to the size of tablets or --worse-- tv screens is attracting customers by the millions.
http://www.dealextreme.com/p/ak802-mini-android-4-0-network-media-player-w-wi-fi-hdmi-tf-usb-black-4gb-1gb-ddr-iii-143431?r=20144190
And yet something already exists, and for cheaper.
It also does not have a Tegra 3 — Quad-core processor, a controller., and Bluetooth support.
Microsoft overtaking Google with Bing? What world do you live in? Instead of googling people in this world, do you Bing them?
Where is the market?
Anyone that has a decent enough TV to want to use it for Android apps is also likely to already have:
- a games console
- a PC/laptop
- a smartphone
$99 price point will never cover any real marketing cost so this is a niche geek product at best
And with the lack of depth of $0.99 games there is not a hope of "turing the industry on its head"
Destined for failure in my books!
Hum. Your first posts are today... I'm thinking Astroturfer...
Where's the game controller?
Try reading the Wired article with images turned on. It looks like an Xbox 360 controller with a laptop-style trackpad in the middle.
Right now take a transformer prime, plug it with a 3 bucks HDMI cable to your TV, and use any xbox 360 controller that would work with a PC (wifi or wired, both will work, but for wifi you need that PC adapter thing), load up Sonic 4, Showgun or whatever and you're there, albeit at a vastly higher price point than even a normal console because, well, its a full feature tablet.
Not surprised someone would cut cost by removing the screen/battery/etc and call it a day.
His mom Mrs. Ballmer told him.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
This seems like shameless propaganda. If Bing is so much better why don't you use Bing much? Maybe because Bing is not better at all? I do a lot of technical research and I have never felt Google lacking on finding me the results I need...
- a smartphone
There are several genres of video games that don't work on a smartphone because they really need a gamepad, and something like the iControlPad doesn't come bundled with most smartphones. What sort of control method is workable for a platformer or a fighting game on a smartphone?
Atleast Android does support gamepads, ie. if you have an Android phone just plug it in your TV and game away.
Bing vs. Google: Fight! Yeah, Bing loses pretty badly.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Racing stripes, a spoiler, maybe cut a hole in the side and add an LED or two. Water cooling is the next step after that.
Haha check out the name, a play on Waggener-Edstrom
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Subtle? His username is a play on his employer's name.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Not bloody likely! Angry Birds is testament to that.
Ah now I get modded up. They had to openly mock us before people took the shilling problem seriously.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
And that... will be the death of it.
Let's ignore first the games cost issue. The problem will be piles of people see "make money fast! make games on this!" and release a pile of steaming turds for 99 cents. It's happened to the Apple App Store, Google Play, and other stores *(Xbox Indie Arcade, anyone?) and those already demand some level of commitment (Apple $99/year and people still do it). Sure it's all cool and all that, but people will just see "make money! free tools!" and crank out crap after crap after crap, making it impossible to find or discover the good stuff.
Also, at 99 cents, the people who do good games will probably split their game up into 5-10 "episodes" in order to charge the $5/10 they wanted in the first place.
It's an intriguing thing, but will probably be flooded with crap soon enough. And do the economics support such a system? The whole point of the 99 cent apps are something you can grab for the few dead minutes you have - in a lineup, waiting for something, etc, as something to do. A home console - well, players tend to have more time to invest in a game and consequently demand more involved games.
Basically "playtime" vs "spare moment time".
I agree. But Apple already has its stars aligned to succeed with this business model already. That just have to release a newer iOS for Apple TV, and perhaps a newer Apple TV that sports better 3D hardware. You just purchase and play online through the App Store. The same store with an account that's bound to perhaps an existing iPad, iPhone, and MacBook.
Apple really has their stuff together with the iOS platform. Make no mistake about that. BTW, this wouldn't be Apple's first entry into the home TV console market. They already had a first go of it with the Apple Pippin. So the business model is not completely foreign to them.
Life is not for the lazy.
You must be young. When everybody moved off the Atari 2600 in 1983, they were not moving to the IBM compatibles. They were moving to Apple II s, Ti99/4a s, and to C64 s, etc. These system easily supported 2 joysticks. In fact, they supported the industry standard 9 pin digital joysticks that the Atari 2600s also used. We simply unplugged them from the Atari, and plugged them into the C64. Not only did they support multiple joysticks, but it was also the norm.
And yes, the public has listened (as they often do) to the marketing people, so they believe something that never existed. This isn't new or surprising.
It doesn't help that at some point, Google decided to stop having it require all search terms to be present in the search results, which was one of Google's major features.
It took me only a moment to find this, but when I googled bacon binoculars and jumped to a random page (in my case, page 5), right in the middle of the page is a link to "Astro Bob | Celestial happenings you can see from your own backyard" which doesn't mention bacon on its page. Later down the same page of results, there's a "Tactical Bacon in 9oz can" which doesn't mention binoculars anywhere... nor does its Google cache page mention that binoculars isn't on the page anywhere, but only in the links other sites use to link to it.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
The first mass market PC's that people actually played games on in any real numbers to really count were the Apple II, TRS 80 1, Commodore PET. Even the big name "home computers of the 80's" that were often used pretty similarly as game consoles came long after the 2600, Intellivision, Bally Arcade, Fairchild Channel F, Odyssey 2, etc. Sure a lot of C64's were sold of machines, but the 2600 still sold MORE.
And it didn't matter if a 1981 IBM PC was more powerful, it cost so much more that it was out of reach for many families....even the C64 was out of reach for many. It was mostly a toy of the upper middle class in my area.
And when tepples says multiple gamepads, he means more than 2.
No, he doesn't. If he did, he would be being intellectually dishonest. Systems of that time rarely if ever had more than 2 game ports.
Whether gaming primarily shifted back to systems without keyboards or not doesn't change the fact that gaming didn't disappear in 1983. It just moved to platforms that marketers didn't count. Some big players lost a bunch of money, and instead of acknowledging that their competitors took their customers, they declared it a crash.
If you click on "show search tools" on the left, and then "verbatim", Google will stop searching for other spellings and synonyms and will require all search terms to be on the page. In general, verbatim mode actually lowers the quality of the search results, which is why it's turned off by default, but there are exceptions so it's made available as an option.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
You're being trolled.
There was a time when Microsoft/Waggener Edstrom/Burson Marsteller shills would place posts praising their own products and slagging Google at the top of every story. I suspect this is intended to be a parody of them.
Having said that, Microsoft must be terrified of these things. They're available for as little as $20 in volume http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/561407182/Ider_Exclusive_Dongle_design_hdmi_dongle.html, and are easily capable enough for browsing the web, email, Facebook, basic office work etc. With HDMI to a decent screen and USB for keyboard and mouse, these dongles could easily replace 90% of home and small office desktops today, if it wasn't for MS Office format lockin.
I don't check or post on Slashdot nearly as often as I used to, and the comments on this article illustrate why.
I mean, look at this. You've got a small team of people who are designing a product that is explicitly intended to be open and hackable. It's cheap, it's stylish, it runs Linux, and they're reaching out to the indie gaming community for support. They've more than doubled their initial goal in under 24 hours and are probably still reeling at the concept of what just happened. The news is sweeping across gaming sites and people are excited to see what's going to happen next.
And the comments on this Slashdot article are overwhelmingly negative. You've got people saying that nobody will want to develop software for a hackable device (like Android or Windows), there's no market for it (the $2M worth of investments so far seem to disagree), you can get cheap Chinese knockoff Android devices cheaper (LOL, just LOL), and some people are even saying it's vaporware like the Phantom. Seriously, the Phantom? That project was started by a guy who had a history of running investment scams. The people who are behind the Ouya are recognized names in the gaming industry and have the support of a lot of indie developers. There's no guarantee that this will end up being a big commercial success, of course, but you clearly haven't even taken a look at it if you think this is a second Phantom.
Slashdot, what happened to you?
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)