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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.'"
A $50 Roku or $60 Blue Ray player can already stream Amazon content fine. Heck, even a Kindle Fire has a micro-HDMI cable.
$300 for an Android game console would be nuts, but it would actually make a lot more sense than a $300 streaming device.
$100 for an Amazon version of the Ouya would be kind of cool.
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A console for Android games?? What a clever and original idea!
I said, before the Ouya was released that it would not be a smashing success, but it will be a success and well it was. A minor success.
I also said it would pave the way for future consoles based on the same idea making the Ouya a version 1.0 type of product and for a version 1.0 the Ouya did pretty well.
The majority of console buyers don't want a PC wannabe console because they're not PC gamers. They want a simple box they can turn on and play simple games on, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with this. The Xbox 1 or PS4 dont fill this market and the Wii U has been pretty underwhelming. So if Amazon can pull of a decent console (like they did with their ereader) then they could own the market in the same way the Wii did.
In fact, I'd be quite surprised if Amazon is the only company going to try this.
Between this and Steamboxen, the Playstation and Xbox will need to change radically to avoid fading into oblivion, both the casual and hardcore gamer will soon have better options and there are not enough hardened fanboys in either camp to sustain them.
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Yes.
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.
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