It doesn't do AR since it isn't in your direct FOV. You need to look up a bit or you will see exactly nothing.
So no Terminator style outlines for people in the street with neat labels attached to them. It won't align that well. If ever.
And let's not forget that consumer grade electronic devices aren't near as rugged as they'd need to be in an industrial working environment. I've seen things that look like you could beat a bluewhale to death with just die withing a couple of months. Smudgy oily metal dust in speaker vents, ports and whatnot would be a thing to behold! And don't even think you can use your everyday device with workmans gloves.
Even paper printouts need to be laminated so they can last the week.
there is only one obvious solution: Embed chips into the brain that write directly onto the visual cortex of your engineer/worker. Drill a hole for a superstrong external wifi antenna into their cranium. Or perhaps replace the cartilage in their ears with a wifi antenna?
That sounds reasonable.
I do not have as much time to play games as I had as a kid. So I simply stop playing when I don't enjoy it.
Which means I have a lot of unfinished games on my plate. For some reason every time I started The Witcher I stop playing around the same spot(right befor the bank robbery). Go figure.
Ok, so just say that you're cheap then. If you get 30 hours of gameplay for even 60 dollars, then you've paid $2 per hour which is far less than any movie or really any other form of media. Good god people make every excuse to avoid the fact that they don't want to pay what things cost.
Compared to stuff that gives the same enjoyment at a third of the cost? There is a difference between production cost and value. AAA games cost too much to produce and too many fail miserably and at a multi-million budget, catastrophically.
I absolutely doubt they will let stuff on their console that uses the Sixaxis kludge.
But since you insist that it is unpossible to play most of the good games on Android with a controller, have it your way. Since you insist the Sixaxis kludge doesn't work, have it your way.
But I have the distinct suspicion you have tried neither yourself. So why again are you arguing against all this? It's fine to have an opinion but you have nothing to back it up with. I'm done arguing with you.
It's not a lot of effort and a lot of games already support controllers.
Those that only have touch control still can be used with a controller. There's an app on Google Play that maps controller input to signals from the touch screen. Needs root. Works well.
Android itself can be fully controlled by mouse and controllers. But mouse or touch is best. With a controller you get the awkwardness of doing something complex on your game console.
You are right that it makes very little sense on a phone. On a tablet on the other hand it is really, really good.
And even a phone can be hooked up to a TV. We had quite a lot of spontaneous gaming sessions with my tablet connected to a beamer.
But then again I carry a lot of peripherals on me since I've ditched my notebook for a tablet.
Nah. They should go for controller. They are already approximating those with those on screen fiddlesticks. Also there is an aftermarket for Android compatible controllers, phone cases with controllers built in, that nVidia shield thing(if it ever goes into production),...
I've seen quite a few twinstick shooters(eXpendable for instance...straight off the Dreamcast) and what FPS we have is of the duck&cover console inspired variety. Oh the joys of aiming with a stick! I've got Shadowgun on my tablet and found I dislike this type of game on tablet as much as I dislike them on PC. Android has a lot of Arcade racers and Puddle is simply better with a controller since tilting your tablet(and turning it outright upside down) doesn't work as you'd expect. While not exactly neccessary, Sonic is also nicer with a controler even if I have been told that the onscreen controls are quite nice.
The only time when I really attach a mouse to my tablet is when I play XCOM or MoM on Dosbox. Using a controller for those would be a bit silly.
Yup. that's what this is saying. It's just a benchmark. Not a measure of what the machine does with the power.
Pretty useless information given there are a gazillion other benchmark tests for mobile chipsets out there that show exactly the same thing: Tegra3 isn't the new hotness anymore. Tegra4(mostly built with unobtainium) propably is.
...yawn...
The submitter is propably one of those raving idiots who hate the Ouya for what he thinks it should be but it never tried to achieve. I don't understand the amount of hate this thing generates. It's quite lovely, actually.
What the snippet did was quite stupid. It basically compared mobile chipsets. The first 60 places are taken by the most powerful chipset in production today. It's not news at all that the Tegra3 has been surpassed.
What kind of idiot would say the Ouya is a bad machine because 70 machines with the more powerful chipset get a better benchmark. Isn't the Ouya using a T33? They should have compared it to a TF700. And even then they should still point out that the Ouya software still is in beta for a couple of months. While ASUS bloat is eternal...
Tegra4 should be in production just about now so I wouldn't be surprised if they did.
The rate in which those mobile SoCs get upgraded is mindboggling. A generation lasts about 1.5 years. What's truly terrifying is that nVidia currently claim they are integrating Kepler into their SoC. The Ouya3 or 4 might very well give the PS4 a run for its money. Or less money so to speak.
Yup. Tegra 3 does a lot of good games. Visuals are a bit vintage 15 years ago, but for such a machine it is still impressive. The next gen SoCs are even more impressive. The Riptide GP2 Tegra4 demo was eyewateringly pretty and I really can't wait for the next gen tablet that tickles my fancy.
The great thing about this is: these SoCs run off batteries. And they are playing a very quick game of catch-up with the big guys.
I think games like Puddle and Osmos(which I run on my Prime) look amazing. Machinarium is also quite nice looking. How a game looks nowadays depends more on the artist than the technology used.
How about all of them?
They also work with a mouse. And keyboard support is also integrated.
The thing that really boggles my mind is there a billions of Android devices out there. But hardly anybody ever tried to hook up his computer peripherals to them despite the fact that most of them(i.e. the non-crappy ones) come with USB/Bluetooth connectivity. HDMI out is also not a product of the drug-addled mind of a science fiction author.
Whatever happened to the old nerd mentality of: I wonder what happens if I hook those two up?
The only games that don't natively support controllers are stupid iPad ports since those iDevices make it a point not to use standard connectors and next to nobody is willing to by specialised hardware for those. Gameloft games are particularly aggravating. Some of them natively support PS3 controllers, some don't. And even if they stupidly insist on touch only onscreen controls there are apps out there where you can map controller buttons/sticks to those.
I just jumped into a quick game of ShadowGun: Deadzone and I absolutely murdered everybody because I have a PS3 controller and a USB cable(my Transformer Prime is not at its best when asked to do Bluetooth and WLAN at the same time).
Given its origin, XBMC is absolutely workable with a controller.
So here is a hint: arm yourself with a USB cable and hook up your peripherals. Try it!
The GP has a point. I've played a lot of AAA games where the actual gameplay gets in the way of an impressive 15 minute cutscene. Those are fiendishly expensive to create and they add nothing to the actual game apart from the occasional "Press X to win". It is as if the game devs have forgotten how to tell a story within actual gameplay.
And let's not talk about the latest murder simulator with attached Sim City knockoff and a naval warfare simulator thrown in for good measure. Those tend to be not very good at either the things they do. If I want to build stuff I get one of the older Sim City installments. If I want to do naval battles I will get a simulator for that. If I buy a murder simulator I want to stabby-stabby and am not interested about their barbecue-defense simulator they have thrown in for good measure.
To my horror they added Superman64 gameplay into Arkham City. And oh wonder! The gameplay for those sequences was just as bad as the thing they copied it from. And that was one of the more logical mini games added to a AAA title in recent memory.
They try to build AAA games into theme parks but you buy them for a single ride. Which makes most of the stuff they threw in superfluous. The cutscenes get in the way of stabby-stabby. And they do cost too much.
AAA games are on their way out. We will not be flooded with them as we have been in the past since a lot of them do not recoup their production cost even at double-digit millions of sales. The market does not sustain them all. Which is one reason why EA hasn't been making money in the past.
And don't get me started on modern manshooters where you get executed for not triggering the next cutscene if you go over there. That's taking the cutscene dictatorship to the next level.
The only thing they did wrong was trying to build their own controller. There are lots of them out there and Bluetooth is as common as mud. If they had saved themselves the expenses and had sold the console at 70 bucks without a controller they would have saved themselves a lot of trouble.
Building a sturdy controller is an art and fiendishly expensive. You can only make that up in numbers. And even if you built a very good controller it still wouldn't be good for everybody since hands vary quite a lot in size. PS3 controllers for instance are far too small for my gigantic mitts.
Even the excellent Deus Ex where I absolutely took my time to finish it yielded only about 30 hrs of game time. When I look through my Steam library I find any game that I have finished has about the same play time on it as Bastion.
I've stopped buying AAA games. They are not good value for money and I will rather pick them up in a sale together with all DLC if at all.
There are 200 games in my Steam library. Only few of them have 60 hrs+ play time on them. One being Skyrim(most of which was spent trying out mods) and Warlock: Master of the Arcane(crap at release, excellent with the latest DLC) at 400 hrs played. Closely followed by the new XCOM and the first Orcs Must Die. Warlock and OMD did cost me a third of what Skyrim/XCOM did and are not considered AAA games. They propably cost a single digit percentile of what Skyrim/XCOM did to produce.
Why again do we have AAA games?
Also I would give a kidney for an XCOM Android port. An extra lung would be thrown in if they kept the art assests/FX intact and degraded them according to the hardware capabilities.
I also game a lot on my Transformer Prime(which with similar specs is 10 places behind the Ouya in that chart). I also rather buy my indie titles for Android.
But the GP has a point. Not the one he is making but a similar one. It is very, very hard to find good games on Google Play. They are buried underneath fart apps and cow-clickers. Google Play has no information whatsoever on controller support. You basically get buried under an avalanche of crap.
If you compare it to Steam then it is not very good. Steam at least has a link to metacritic which in turn has links to lots of reviews you can read to get an idea if the game is finished and any good. I know of no Android gaming news site that isn't entirely aweful and have to rely on gaming news delivered by the nVidia news apps. Which as a news source is absolutely terrible.
The sheer amount of crap the numerous gems are buried remind me of the video game crash of the 80ies.
OTOH I hear of talk to bring the new kickstarted Shadowrun game to Android. Yet this has generated no buzz whatsoever in the Android gaming scene.
Also I find it rather shocking how little people know about their Android devices. The son of one of my colleagues is currently interning with us. He had no idea that he could pair a PS3 controller to his Android device and that the better games do support it. It took his dad's boss to show him what proper games look like on that device class. People are not using their hardware to full potential due to lack of knowledge. If they knew then theyd consider building the Ouya an actual no-brainer. A historic neccessity. Unavoidable. I mean, how brilliant is the idea to build a consle from off-the-shelf inexpensive electronic parts for a platfomr that already has tons of viable games? All they need to do is make sure they sift the crap and promote the hell out of the good games.
On a side note:
Only buy Gameloft games after you have thouroughly informed yourself on the particular title. Most of them are iPad ports and don't support PS3 controllers. And if they do the support is rather sketchy. Their customer support says that they may add support at a future time. But games like the excellent Samurai Vengeance 2 seem to be abandoned. And with on-screen controls this game sadly becomes just another cow-clicker.
This could well be very true. I backed it on Kickstarter precisely because I wanted a low power ARM-based 1080p media device that was more flexible than offerings from Sony, MS, Nintendo. Had no real interest in it personally as a gaming console.
That said... I read TFA. It completely misses the point. Sure, because brand new bleeding edge phones have higher performance, Ouya (at #70) is a loser. Good grief. It is a certainty that there will be between 100 and 1000 PCs (and Macs) of varying configurations from reasonable manufacturers that will exceed the PS4 and Xbox 720 when they are released (at #101-#1001). (at octo-core 1.6 GHz Jag and roughly half the performance of a 670 video card it won't be difficult). Does that mean that these consoles are failures and Sony and MS should give up?
Of course not. They will have defined a stable platform that is "good enough" for some years of gaming, along with interfaces to enable that.
Ditto, potentially, Ouya.
Will Ouya succeed? I've no idea, but the raw power of the console is unlikely to be a material issue at this point.
And the Ouya software still is entirely beta and will be for quite some time.
As anybody can attest: Android devices with not optimised/slimmed down system software can bevery sluggish. They have been performance testing at the wrong time and that is dishonest.
Also this hardly is news since Tegra3 is yesterdays news and has been surpassed for quite some time. Yet there are not many games that take it really to the edge. It's like claiming that the Geforce 680 has been surpassed by the latest ATI offering. That'd be interesting but of no particular value since nearly no games under normal circumstances strain either of them.
Do not plan for hundreds of millions of concurrent users at once right off the bat. That's the very common error a lot of startups make. You do not have such a large userbase. It will take some time until you have.
Think smaller and scale up when your idea takes off. Set yourself concurrent user milestones when you rethink your architecture. You will also have to rethink the iron your stuff runs on and that may dictate what kind of technology you use when you reached your hundreds of millions goal.
Technology is interchangeable. It's a tool and you choose the best tool for the job and at the moment you have no users and might as well start off with the usual suspects. JSP/Struts, JSF, whatever you are most comfortable with. If in the long run you do find that this is not sustainable and you need to shift to another technology then you can hopefully afford to hire people who know it.
You really, really should set yourself userbase milestones, plan ahead for reaching them and be prepared when you reach them. For that you need a lot of information. Log how much time users spend on what functionality you offer because this also has an impact on your UI design when you go big. It also has impact on what technology(-ies) you use.
I usually bill big when I give advice such as this and help setting up a plan when to do what. Your problem is less one of technology but a business one. Think like a businessman first and like a techie second.
The PS3 is playing catch up with PCs. I remember being impressed by what the current gen could do at that price at that time. I'm not impressed with what Sony has announced.
Surely game engines are already properly multithreaded? I can't think of a way how you could sanely do it otherwise?
He points out that we put all our eggs into one basket.
Also the sheer amazing coincident of life is mindboggling. It still is quite fragile. It might be one of a kind we should take life as such very seriously.
Even tho life on earth still has to produce some level of intelligence. We had some hope on rats and dolphins but they were a bit of a disappointment.
"Justice System" is a bit of a misnomer because it isn't there to deal out justice. It's there to ensure order. What order is is defined in laws. Since laws are generally broadly phrased, a judge will always try to rule in the spirit of the law and what is constitutional.
If there were a law "thou shalt be fucked by a bear each sunday" and you refuse a bear then you might be up for a tough time. Unless you get a judge with balls(metaphorically speaking) who points out that this law is unconstitutional and the spirit of the law is questionable in some respect even if it is popular in the bear community.
Laws and justice don't even live in the same house.
You will have to break it down to what people use their machines for.
For the usual tasks like light office work and web browsing tablets nearly have all the processing power you'll ever need. Which means a machine like an Ouya with a keyboard, a mouse and a screen are enough. Ican remember whan PCs hardly could handle a GUI and autocorrection of Word would bog the machine down. These days are gone and have been gone for 10 years.
Gamers used to buy/upgrade every 2 years if they could afford it. But even for gamers, CPU power ceased to be an issue 10 years ago(with very few exceptions). We upgraded our machines when the newest graphics cards didn't fit into our mainboards anymore and upgraded the whole thing instead.
Speaking of graphics cards. The current console generation has kept us at a DirectX9 level for ages. Since most games tend to be either cross plattform or not very resource hungry to begin with, that is the level you actually needed. If you've got a Geforce 580 you will be good to go for some time even though upgrades have been available for some time now.
If you do really heavy lifting development then you propably also are content with what you have and if you aren't you might rather buy a second machine. I do a lot of development and I typically run a database, an IDE, an application server, tons of browser taps, multiple PDF and OpenOffice documents at once and my machine is bored stiff. I've got an i7, 16gigs of memory and the single biggest and best upgrade I got in the past years was an SSD drive. If that machine were bogged down by the stuff I run I'd rather buy a cheapass second machine to run the application server and databases on.
This is something that's currently just thinking in. We have a hardware generation that is basically good enough. If you have specialised need then as in any generation before this one you will need specialised hardware(for example for video encoding...but I suspect a stock beefy graphics card will be sufficient).
A lot of companies understand this. For instance nVidia(I've been following their strategy the closest out of curiosity) bowed out of the big 3 console market and left that to AMD. Instead they eagerly beaver away to get the power consumption of their current gen Kepler tech down. They seriously want to build this into phones and tablets. That's their 600 line of products. In a phone!
I can see the appeal of simply sliding your tablet/phone into a docking station and have a full gaming grade/office machine. We are already nearly there.
I've ditched my laptop for a tablet-come-netbook(Asus Transformer series) for my computing needs on the road. I decked it out with 256GB of storage and use all my notebook pripherals with it. It's more than enough for web browsing, giving presentations and outlining specs.
If that is powerful enough for office work then you can see why Microsoft is crapping their pants. This is a non-Windows environment poaching on their turf. And ARM based non-Windows machines with these capabilities outnumber PCs by a staggering magnitude with a lot of growth in power and a 1-1.5 year upgrade cycle.
The tablets you now can buy for 700 bucks have graphics capabilities of 10 years ago. Those you can buy in summer have graphics capabilities of 5 years ago. And they continue at this pace. And if you were clever enough to go Android instead of iOS then you most likely can use stock peripherals with these. My PS3 controller works flawlessly with my tablet. No rooting, no hassle. Connect via USB and it's paired via Bluetooth. For the lulz I tried using a cheapass wireless keyboard and mouse with my tablet. I attached the USB dongle thing and was good to go without faffing around in any systems menus. A beamer is easily attached via USB and the controller support is so good I can control presentations with a PS3 controller. Mouse support is equally good. Same goes for keyboards. And I get 12 hrs of heavy use out of this thing because it has a second battery in the keyboa
For some reason my cat loves chewing on USB plugs, sleep on the keyboard, store excess fur in vents, claw metal casing...but it has yet to outright kill a computer. He also likes to mutilate me and won't wait until I'm dead before he eats me,
But neverever has he peed on anything electronic. So no computer upgrades by act of Cat for me:(
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It doesn't do AR since it isn't in your direct FOV. You need to look up a bit or you will see exactly nothing.
So no Terminator style outlines for people in the street with neat labels attached to them. It won't align that well. If ever.
Who the hell hauls an iMac into a Starbucks and plops it down on a table to use right then and there?
You do that to be ironic.
And let's not forget that consumer grade electronic devices aren't near as rugged as they'd need to be in an industrial working environment. I've seen things that look like you could beat a bluewhale to death with just die withing a couple of months. Smudgy oily metal dust in speaker vents, ports and whatnot would be a thing to behold! And don't even think you can use your everyday device with workmans gloves.
Even paper printouts need to be laminated so they can last the week.
there is only one obvious solution: Embed chips into the brain that write directly onto the visual cortex of your engineer/worker. Drill a hole for a superstrong external wifi antenna into their cranium. Or perhaps replace the cartilage in their ears with a wifi antenna?
That sounds reasonable.
Hours are measurable. The rest is gut feeling.
I do not have as much time to play games as I had as a kid. So I simply stop playing when I don't enjoy it.
Which means I have a lot of unfinished games on my plate. For some reason every time I started The Witcher I stop playing around the same spot(right befor the bank robbery). Go figure.
They are not good value for the money?
Ok, so just say that you're cheap then. If you get 30 hours of gameplay for even 60 dollars, then you've paid $2 per hour which is far less than any movie or really any other form of media. Good god people make every excuse to avoid the fact that they don't want to pay what things cost.
Compared to stuff that gives the same enjoyment at a third of the cost? There is a difference between production cost and value. AAA games cost too much to produce and too many fail miserably and at a multi-million budget, catastrophically.
I absolutely doubt they will let stuff on their console that uses the Sixaxis kludge.
But since you insist that it is unpossible to play most of the good games on Android with a controller, have it your way. Since you insist the Sixaxis kludge doesn't work, have it your way.
But I have the distinct suspicion you have tried neither yourself. So why again are you arguing against all this? It's fine to have an opinion but you have nothing to back it up with. I'm done arguing with you.
It's not a lot of effort and a lot of games already support controllers.
Those that only have touch control still can be used with a controller. There's an app on Google Play that maps controller input to signals from the touch screen. Needs root. Works well.
Android itself can be fully controlled by mouse and controllers. But mouse or touch is best. With a controller you get the awkwardness of doing something complex on your game console.
You are right that it makes very little sense on a phone. On a tablet on the other hand it is really, really good.
And even a phone can be hooked up to a TV. We had quite a lot of spontaneous gaming sessions with my tablet connected to a beamer.
But then again I carry a lot of peripherals on me since I've ditched my notebook for a tablet.
Nah. They should go for controller. They are already approximating those with those on screen fiddlesticks. Also there is an aftermarket for Android compatible controllers, phone cases with controllers built in, that nVidia shield thing(if it ever goes into production),...
I've seen quite a few twinstick shooters(eXpendable for instance...straight off the Dreamcast) and what FPS we have is of the duck&cover console inspired variety. Oh the joys of aiming with a stick! I've got Shadowgun on my tablet and found I dislike this type of game on tablet as much as I dislike them on PC. Android has a lot of Arcade racers and Puddle is simply better with a controller since tilting your tablet(and turning it outright upside down) doesn't work as you'd expect. While not exactly neccessary, Sonic is also nicer with a controler even if I have been told that the onscreen controls are quite nice.
The only time when I really attach a mouse to my tablet is when I play XCOM or MoM on Dosbox. Using a controller for those would be a bit silly.
Yup. that's what this is saying. It's just a benchmark. Not a measure of what the machine does with the power.
...yawn...
Pretty useless information given there are a gazillion other benchmark tests for mobile chipsets out there that show exactly the same thing: Tegra3 isn't the new hotness anymore. Tegra4(mostly built with unobtainium) propably is.
The submitter is propably one of those raving idiots who hate the Ouya for what he thinks it should be but it never tried to achieve. I don't understand the amount of hate this thing generates. It's quite lovely, actually.
What the snippet did was quite stupid. It basically compared mobile chipsets. The first 60 places are taken by the most powerful chipset in production today. It's not news at all that the Tegra3 has been surpassed.
What kind of idiot would say the Ouya is a bad machine because 70 machines with the more powerful chipset get a better benchmark. Isn't the Ouya using a T33? They should have compared it to a TF700. And even then they should still point out that the Ouya software still is in beta for a couple of months. While ASUS bloat is eternal...
Tegra4 should be in production just about now so I wouldn't be surprised if they did.
The rate in which those mobile SoCs get upgraded is mindboggling. A generation lasts about 1.5 years. What's truly terrifying is that nVidia currently claim they are integrating Kepler into their SoC. The Ouya3 or 4 might very well give the PS4 a run for its money. Or less money so to speak.
Yup. Tegra 3 does a lot of good games. Visuals are a bit vintage 15 years ago, but for such a machine it is still impressive. The next gen SoCs are even more impressive. The Riptide GP2 Tegra4 demo was eyewateringly pretty and I really can't wait for the next gen tablet that tickles my fancy.
The great thing about this is: these SoCs run off batteries. And they are playing a very quick game of catch-up with the big guys.
I think games like Puddle and Osmos(which I run on my Prime) look amazing. Machinarium is also quite nice looking. How a game looks nowadays depends more on the artist than the technology used.
Given this is Android:
How about all of them?
They also work with a mouse. And keyboard support is also integrated.
The thing that really boggles my mind is there a billions of Android devices out there. But hardly anybody ever tried to hook up his computer peripherals to them despite the fact that most of them(i.e. the non-crappy ones) come with USB/Bluetooth connectivity. HDMI out is also not a product of the drug-addled mind of a science fiction author.
Whatever happened to the old nerd mentality of: I wonder what happens if I hook those two up?
The only games that don't natively support controllers are stupid iPad ports since those iDevices make it a point not to use standard connectors and next to nobody is willing to by specialised hardware for those. Gameloft games are particularly aggravating. Some of them natively support PS3 controllers, some don't. And even if they stupidly insist on touch only onscreen controls there are apps out there where you can map controller buttons/sticks to those.
I just jumped into a quick game of ShadowGun: Deadzone and I absolutely murdered everybody because I have a PS3 controller and a USB cable(my Transformer Prime is not at its best when asked to do Bluetooth and WLAN at the same time).
Given its origin, XBMC is absolutely workable with a controller.
So here is a hint: arm yourself with a USB cable and hook up your peripherals. Try it!
The GP has a point. I've played a lot of AAA games where the actual gameplay gets in the way of an impressive 15 minute cutscene. Those are fiendishly expensive to create and they add nothing to the actual game apart from the occasional "Press X to win". It is as if the game devs have forgotten how to tell a story within actual gameplay.
And let's not talk about the latest murder simulator with attached Sim City knockoff and a naval warfare simulator thrown in for good measure. Those tend to be not very good at either the things they do. If I want to build stuff I get one of the older Sim City installments. If I want to do naval battles I will get a simulator for that. If I buy a murder simulator I want to stabby-stabby and am not interested about their barbecue-defense simulator they have thrown in for good measure.
To my horror they added Superman64 gameplay into Arkham City. And oh wonder! The gameplay for those sequences was just as bad as the thing they copied it from. And that was one of the more logical mini games added to a AAA title in recent memory.
They try to build AAA games into theme parks but you buy them for a single ride. Which makes most of the stuff they threw in superfluous. The cutscenes get in the way of stabby-stabby. And they do cost too much.
AAA games are on their way out. We will not be flooded with them as we have been in the past since a lot of them do not recoup their production cost even at double-digit millions of sales. The market does not sustain them all. Which is one reason why EA hasn't been making money in the past.
And don't get me started on modern manshooters where you get executed for not triggering the next cutscene if you go over there. That's taking the cutscene dictatorship to the next level.
The only thing they did wrong was trying to build their own controller. There are lots of them out there and Bluetooth is as common as mud. If they had saved themselves the expenses and had sold the console at 70 bucks without a controller they would have saved themselves a lot of trouble.
Building a sturdy controller is an art and fiendishly expensive. You can only make that up in numbers. And even if you built a very good controller it still wouldn't be good for everybody since hands vary quite a lot in size. PS3 controllers for instance are far too small for my gigantic mitts.
Even the excellent Deus Ex where I absolutely took my time to finish it yielded only about 30 hrs of game time. When I look through my Steam library I find any game that I have finished has about the same play time on it as Bastion.
I've stopped buying AAA games. They are not good value for money and I will rather pick them up in a sale together with all DLC if at all.
There are 200 games in my Steam library. Only few of them have 60 hrs+ play time on them. One being Skyrim(most of which was spent trying out mods) and Warlock: Master of the Arcane(crap at release, excellent with the latest DLC) at 400 hrs played. Closely followed by the new XCOM and the first Orcs Must Die. Warlock and OMD did cost me a third of what Skyrim/XCOM did and are not considered AAA games. They propably cost a single digit percentile of what Skyrim/XCOM did to produce.
Why again do we have AAA games?
Also I would give a kidney for an XCOM Android port. An extra lung would be thrown in if they kept the art assests/FX intact and degraded them according to the hardware capabilities.
I also game a lot on my Transformer Prime(which with similar specs is 10 places behind the Ouya in that chart). I also rather buy my indie titles for Android.
But the GP has a point. Not the one he is making but a similar one. It is very, very hard to find good games on Google Play. They are buried underneath fart apps and cow-clickers. Google Play has no information whatsoever on controller support. You basically get buried under an avalanche of crap.
If you compare it to Steam then it is not very good. Steam at least has a link to metacritic which in turn has links to lots of reviews you can read to get an idea if the game is finished and any good. I know of no Android gaming news site that isn't entirely aweful and have to rely on gaming news delivered by the nVidia news apps. Which as a news source is absolutely terrible.
The sheer amount of crap the numerous gems are buried remind me of the video game crash of the 80ies.
OTOH I hear of talk to bring the new kickstarted Shadowrun game to Android. Yet this has generated no buzz whatsoever in the Android gaming scene.
Also I find it rather shocking how little people know about their Android devices. The son of one of my colleagues is currently interning with us. He had no idea that he could pair a PS3 controller to his Android device and that the better games do support it. It took his dad's boss to show him what proper games look like on that device class. People are not using their hardware to full potential due to lack of knowledge. If they knew then theyd consider building the Ouya an actual no-brainer. A historic neccessity. Unavoidable. I mean, how brilliant is the idea to build a consle from off-the-shelf inexpensive electronic parts for a platfomr that already has tons of viable games? All they need to do is make sure they sift the crap and promote the hell out of the good games.
On a side note:
Only buy Gameloft games after you have thouroughly informed yourself on the particular title. Most of them are iPad ports and don't support PS3 controllers. And if they do the support is rather sketchy. Their customer support says that they may add support at a future time. But games like the excellent Samurai Vengeance 2 seem to be abandoned. And with on-screen controls this game sadly becomes just another cow-clicker.
This could well be very true. I backed it on Kickstarter precisely because I wanted a low power ARM-based 1080p media device that was more flexible than offerings from Sony, MS, Nintendo. Had no real interest in it personally as a gaming console.
That said... I read TFA. It completely misses the point. Sure, because brand new bleeding edge phones have higher performance, Ouya (at #70) is a loser. Good grief. It is a certainty that there will be between 100 and 1000 PCs (and Macs) of varying configurations from reasonable manufacturers that will exceed the PS4 and Xbox 720 when they are released (at #101-#1001). (at octo-core 1.6 GHz Jag and roughly half the performance of a 670 video card it won't be difficult). Does that mean that these consoles are failures and Sony and MS should give up?
Of course not. They will have defined a stable platform that is "good enough" for some years of gaming, along with interfaces to enable that.
Ditto, potentially, Ouya.
Will Ouya succeed? I've no idea, but the raw power of the console is unlikely to be a material issue at this point.
And the Ouya software still is entirely beta and will be for quite some time.
As anybody can attest: Android devices with not optimised/slimmed down system software can bevery sluggish. They have been performance testing at the wrong time and that is dishonest.
Also this hardly is news since Tegra3 is yesterdays news and has been surpassed for quite some time. Yet there are not many games that take it really to the edge. It's like claiming that the Geforce 680 has been surpassed by the latest ATI offering. That'd be interesting but of no particular value since nearly no games under normal circumstances strain either of them.
Do not plan for hundreds of millions of concurrent users at once right off the bat. That's the very common error a lot of startups make. You do not have such a large userbase. It will take some time until you have.
Think smaller and scale up when your idea takes off. Set yourself concurrent user milestones when you rethink your architecture. You will also have to rethink the iron your stuff runs on and that may dictate what kind of technology you use when you reached your hundreds of millions goal.
Technology is interchangeable. It's a tool and you choose the best tool for the job and at the moment you have no users and might as well start off with the usual suspects. JSP/Struts, JSF, whatever you are most comfortable with. If in the long run you do find that this is not sustainable and you need to shift to another technology then you can hopefully afford to hire people who know it.
You really, really should set yourself userbase milestones, plan ahead for reaching them and be prepared when you reach them. For that you need a lot of information. Log how much time users spend on what functionality you offer because this also has an impact on your UI design when you go big. It also has impact on what technology(-ies) you use.
I usually bill big when I give advice such as this and help setting up a plan when to do what. Your problem is less one of technology but a business one. Think like a businessman first and like a techie second.
The PS3 is playing catch up with PCs. I remember being impressed by what the current gen could do at that price at that time. I'm not impressed with what Sony has announced.
Surely game engines are already properly multithreaded? I can't think of a way how you could sanely do it otherwise?
He points out that we put all our eggs into one basket.
Also the sheer amazing coincident of life is mindboggling. It still is quite fragile. It might be one of a kind we should take life as such very seriously.
Even tho life on earth still has to produce some level of intelligence. We had some hope on rats and dolphins but they were a bit of a disappointment.
"Justice System" is a bit of a misnomer because it isn't there to deal out justice. It's there to ensure order. What order is is defined in laws. Since laws are generally broadly phrased, a judge will always try to rule in the spirit of the law and what is constitutional.
If there were a law "thou shalt be fucked by a bear each sunday" and you refuse a bear then you might be up for a tough time. Unless you get a judge with balls(metaphorically speaking) who points out that this law is unconstitutional and the spirit of the law is questionable in some respect even if it is popular in the bear community.
Laws and justice don't even live in the same house.
You will have to break it down to what people use their machines for.
For the usual tasks like light office work and web browsing tablets nearly have all the processing power you'll ever need. Which means a machine like an Ouya with a keyboard, a mouse and a screen are enough. Ican remember whan PCs hardly could handle a GUI and autocorrection of Word would bog the machine down. These days are gone and have been gone for 10 years.
Gamers used to buy/upgrade every 2 years if they could afford it. But even for gamers, CPU power ceased to be an issue 10 years ago(with very few exceptions). We upgraded our machines when the newest graphics cards didn't fit into our mainboards anymore and upgraded the whole thing instead.
Speaking of graphics cards. The current console generation has kept us at a DirectX9 level for ages. Since most games tend to be either cross plattform or not very resource hungry to begin with, that is the level you actually needed. If you've got a Geforce 580 you will be good to go for some time even though upgrades have been available for some time now.
If you do really heavy lifting development then you propably also are content with what you have and if you aren't you might rather buy a second machine. I do a lot of development and I typically run a database, an IDE, an application server, tons of browser taps, multiple PDF and OpenOffice documents at once and my machine is bored stiff. I've got an i7, 16gigs of memory and the single biggest and best upgrade I got in the past years was an SSD drive. If that machine were bogged down by the stuff I run I'd rather buy a cheapass second machine to run the application server and databases on.
This is something that's currently just thinking in. We have a hardware generation that is basically good enough. If you have specialised need then as in any generation before this one you will need specialised hardware(for example for video encoding...but I suspect a stock beefy graphics card will be sufficient).
A lot of companies understand this. For instance nVidia(I've been following their strategy the closest out of curiosity) bowed out of the big 3 console market and left that to AMD. Instead they eagerly beaver away to get the power consumption of their current gen Kepler tech down. They seriously want to build this into phones and tablets. That's their 600 line of products. In a phone!
I can see the appeal of simply sliding your tablet/phone into a docking station and have a full gaming grade/office machine. We are already nearly there.
I've ditched my laptop for a tablet-come-netbook(Asus Transformer series) for my computing needs on the road. I decked it out with 256GB of storage and use all my notebook pripherals with it. It's more than enough for web browsing, giving presentations and outlining specs.
If that is powerful enough for office work then you can see why Microsoft is crapping their pants. This is a non-Windows environment poaching on their turf. And ARM based non-Windows machines with these capabilities outnumber PCs by a staggering magnitude with a lot of growth in power and a 1-1.5 year upgrade cycle.
The tablets you now can buy for 700 bucks have graphics capabilities of 10 years ago. Those you can buy in summer have graphics capabilities of 5 years ago. And they continue at this pace. And if you were clever enough to go Android instead of iOS then you most likely can use stock peripherals with these. My PS3 controller works flawlessly with my tablet. No rooting, no hassle. Connect via USB and it's paired via Bluetooth. For the lulz I tried using a cheapass wireless keyboard and mouse with my tablet. I attached the USB dongle thing and was good to go without faffing around in any systems menus. A beamer is easily attached via USB and the controller support is so good I can control presentations with a PS3 controller. Mouse support is equally good. Same goes for keyboards. And I get 12 hrs of heavy use out of this thing because it has a second battery in the keyboa
For some reason my cat loves chewing on USB plugs, sleep on the keyboard, store excess fur in vents, claw metal casing...but it has yet to outright kill a computer. He also likes to mutilate me and won't wait until I'm dead before he eats me, :(
But neverever has he peed on anything electronic. So no computer upgrades by act of Cat for me