Anyone else seen this?
Any thoughts?
For some reason I’m more interested in this one than the Ouya…and $500 for the developer version is a bit more reasonable than the Ouya one…
Their timescales seem optimistic though, even with a working prototype now they reckon they can deliver in March/April this year!
I think there are probably a few articles on the web speculating on why most hardware kickstarters fail (like a really big percentage. 99%?).
Generally, I think people who have the experience to make a successful hardware run don’t need kickstarter. Maybe it’s just starting to get trendy now… perhaps there are people who are fully capable of going the traditional hardware funding route who just see this as an alternative. I somehow don’t think so, though.
I would also point out that there are already quite a few similar devices on the market that run everything from Android to Linux.
If you want to compete in this market, you have to have a good app store. Which turns into a Bill and Ted’s style “Eddie Van Halen on guitar” conversation.
Yeah. The timing on this does feel a bit like they are cashing in on the Ouya too…they saw the funds that raised and thought “ooo, we can do that too”…
IMO, from all those consoles, one will succeed, and that’s enough for me. I hope that one of them changes the market of consoles a bit. But what I think is a bad design nowadays is the need to a developer to specify for which platform he wants to run on, each one of them having their own programming languages and outrageous SDK’s prices. Honestly, fuck all those companies, I need to sleep.
I still think there isn’t really a market for these consoles other than a bunch of hopeful indie developers and indie-developer wanna-bes. I think they all will fail because they are producing something that will be obsolete soon.
Hardcore console gamers will never buy these as they aren’t powerful enough. It also remains to be seen how well the next gen consoles will do and those are top of the class. Even the current generation kind of blows these little devices away.
More casual gamers already have their portables… and it’s just an adapter away from being plugged into the TV, already has a thriving app store, etc…
I still think one of them will succeed (probably we gonna see another showing up). If they don’t come out expensive, things can work pretty well. The only problem for them is how to sync Google App Store and their appstore (presuming they want to do it), so that you buy it once and receive it everywhere, so users can play on both console and smartphone.
Theres many android sticks and boards now… My colleague just bought a small stick that basically just has USB and HDMI at each end. Maybe we should just release a version of android tailored for jME and market it as a game box OS too 
@shirkit said: I still think one of them will succeed (probably we gonna see another showing up). If they don't come out expensive, things can work pretty well. The only problem for them is how to sync Google App Store and their appstore (presuming they want to do it), so that you buy it once and receive it everywhere, so users can play on both console and smartphone.
I still don’t see the market, though. Who is going to buy these? And more to the point, who is going to buy the apps through their exclusive store. Even you bring up synching to another store.
Basically, it’s a high end tablet without the touch screen, without the portability, without the content, and without the app store. Or you just tack it onto google or amazon’s app store and lose the entire place to earn any profit. There is no profit to be made on the hardware and someone will always come along and undercut you if you are just using regular android apps. You have to earn it somewhere else… these are content delivery platforms. If you aren’t the one delivering the content then you are out of the loop and out of business.
@normen said: Theres many android sticks and boards now.. My colleague just bought a small stick that basically just has USB and HDMI at each end. Maybe we should just release a version of android tailored for jME and market it as a game box OS too ;)
That would be cool! 
These things will be down to sub-$50 range in a year or so, I bet.
I’m not Nostradamus, but I say that something good will come out of that.
@pspeed said:@normen said: Theres many android sticks and boards now.. My colleague just bought a small stick that basically just has USB and HDMI at each end. Maybe we should just release a version of android tailored for jME and market it as a game box OS too ;)That would be cool!
Yeah, that thing was only 49€ and it had a GPU that decodes h264, its crazy Some OS stack with a nice installer that checks for graphics capabilities etc. and some centralized menu that can openly be extended… Why not? And even if its not successful, we should be compatible to any android OS based thing out of the box anyway.
@normen said: And even if its not successful, we should be compatible to any android OS based thing out of the box anyway.
…says every Android game developer… everywhere… which is why these consoles based on any kind of exclusivity are doomed.
I’m always happy to see another pellet in the Android Console shotgun shell. Let’er rip.