Slashdot Mirror
Is Amazon Making a Sub-$300 Console To Play Mobile Games?
itwbennett writes "Yesterday, a story suggesting that Amazon was planning to launch a sub-$300 Android game console made the rounds. A $300 box to play mobile games on your TV? ITworld's Peter Smith doesn't buy it. 'If Amazon is working on some kind of set-top box, it's going to be about streaming,' says Smith. 'Music, video, and games. Remember back in November when Amazon announced G2, a new AWS instance type designed for streaming GPU intensive tasks like games? Combine Amazon's G2 cloud servers and an Amazon set top box for console-like game streaming, plus supporting Android and/or iOS games (possibly the latter would also be streamed), and of course support for Amazon Video and MP3, and we're getting closer to something that may be worth $300.'"
Thee Wii actually had a software attach ratio of between 9 and 12 depending on how you count certain games (some people don't count Wii Sports because it was bundled with the hardware, but it was only bundled in certain territories, similarly for Wii Play which was bundled with a controller, or Wii Fit which was bundled with the balance board).
The PS3 and 360 had ratios between 9 and 11.
I'm not saying that it would necessarily be trivial; just that they don't have much choice. As of a few minutes ago, when I checked, I could get an Xbox360 (250GB HDD, 1 controller, Halo 4, and Tomb Raider) for $250 or the nasty cut-down 4GB-of-flash version for $200. All with the advantage of a large, guaranteed (and typically available used for peanuts, since it's a last-gen system) game library.
Unless Amazon is seriously stealth-launching a tier 1 console, without so much as a ripple from the various studios and devs who they'd need to build games for such a beast, they'll be laughed out of the market if they try something at the same price as an incumbent console.