Ouya Android Console Blows Past Kickstarter Goal 270
mikejuk writes with a winner for quickest follow-up in a while as the Ouya console managed to raise over $2 million in a mere eight hours. From the article: "On the surface it all sounds like a really good idea. The OUYA games console is planned to be an open competitor to the likes of Xbox and PS3. It seems so good that it has been crowd funded to the tune of $1 million — but why exactly is it needed? There must be a good reason — after all the wisdom of crowds is never wrong. The simple answer seems to be freedom. The company claims that you can do what you want to the machine. A CyanogenMod port would allow you to do what you like to the OS and it wouldn't void your warranty. You can hack the hardware or software. However, it is important to note that this isn't open hardware. ... In the same way the software seems to be open and yet controlled. ... The Kickstarter page says 'When we say, "open" we mean it. We've made many decisions based on this philosophy:..' But it isn't Open Source. And yet it is so much better than the alternative. Perhaps this is a sign of just how desperate we all are to get away from the control of the big console manufacturers, that we will fund anything that sounds even slightly reasonable. The walled gardens of Apple, Sony and Microsoft no longer seem the warm and welcoming places they once did (if they ever did)"
Issues not raised on yesterday's post; the console will require a significant number of binary blobs just to function, and it's really unclear whether or not it will actually be DRM free. Anyone remember Indrema?
Holy funding, splatman! (Score:5, Insightful)
That's got to be a serious contender for the record of fastest funded project on Kickstarter in the category of nearly a million dollars... But anyway, I hope this means we'll get to see what they come up with - a 99 dollar console is just about in the range of 'sure, I'll bite - see what it's like' in terms of risk to the consumer.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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All they need is some developers who know to focus on the FUN factor of games. I'm tired of the industry rating games on graphics and realism. I want games that are fun, with a high replayability factor. I have enough realism from 8-5. I don't need to see individual hairs on the back of my character's neck stand up when he gets shot in the face.
Why shouldn't we try for both?
Re:Holy funding, splatman! (Score:5, Insightful)
Because graphics cost a lot of money, and effort there would be better off on gameplay or the next title. or on a cheaper game-I'd rather have it coat half as much and have snes era graphics.
Add for realism- for some games, it's good. For most, out actively detracts from fun gameplay. Concentrate on it only if it's a key concept, otherwise ignore it
Re:Holy funding, splatman! (Score:5, Insightful)
Add for realism- for some games, it's good. For most, out actively detracts from fun gameplay. Concentrate on it only if it's a key concept, otherwise ignore it
As a long time gamer I wholeheartedly agree. While we've seen an increase in graphics quality over time, we've seen very little movement in terms of innovative gameplay/controls/storylines/etc. Lately, it's only the indie games that I've seen that have implemented really original ideas. I love the idea of a console like this coming to market, it will give the big guys a run for their money.
Re:Holy funding, splatman! (Score:5, Insightful)
Because we'd like to be able to play the games without waiting 10 years for the development to finish. If there are engineering trade-offs to be made in game dev, please opt for "fun" over "realistic", Devs.
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Isn't there a $99 Xbox 360 version?
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99 bucks is so little money nowadays. I would gladly shell out 200 for a way better version of the same concept.
I think this will be for casual gamers. Nothing about this idea sounds like immersive graphics and physics. Sounds more like an android Wii.... meh.
More power, please. Gamers that use their systems and hang around like blockbusters far more than popping bubbles.
Re:Holy funding, splatman! (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with your argument is that the Wii is actually a pretty good console - it's just saddled with crappy games because that's all that makes it past Nintendo's vetting process. Cheap and sleezy ports and titles that are just 'phoned in' make up a large bulk of the console's 'shovelware'. If Nintendo didn't require you to be an A tier developer with blockbuster games already in your stable - then they'd have some room for innovative products on the platform. As it is - they have geared their developer's licensing to poach developers from other consoles.
Given the Android platform, this could really open the world of console game development to the independents - those who could never convince Nintendo or Sony to even sell them a development kit - or pay for Microsoft XBOX's QA for deployment on XBOX Live. I've seen some really impressive indie games out there - and this could be their shot at getting in on a console that hasn't already 'cherry-picked' their developer base.
Of course, there is also a lot of $hit indie games as well - but that's kind of to be expected with no vetting process of any kind. Perhaps as the market matures, places like Metacritic and game magazines will review and rate indie titles on such systems as this more frequently - and it will not be such a crap-shoot.
The 1983 crash, nearly three decades later (Score:3)
If Nintendo didn't require you to be an A tier developer with blockbuster games already in your stable
Think of it from Nintendo's point of view. In 1983, shelves were filled with low-budget me-too games that clearly fulfilled Theodore Sturgeon's 1958 revelation about 90 percent of works in a genre or medium [wikipedia.org]. This almost killed the living room video game industry in 1983. If you haven't proven that you can finish a commercial game above the 50th percentile of quality, why should Nintendo let you see its trade secrets?
they have geared their developer's licensing to poach developers from other consoles.
Why do you think only games for other consoles count as "relevant video game industry experi
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And yet the Wii's game line up still sports such classic blockbusters as "Now: That's What I call Music Dance & Sing", "Tamagotchi: Party On!" and "My Aquarium".
Honestly, if the Wii's games catalogue is a result of "careful vetting", I dread to think what their vetting rejects.
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The problem with your argument is that the Wii is actually a pretty good console - it's just saddled with crappy games because that's all that makes it past Nintendo's vetting process.
What are you talking about? Lots of good games made it past Nintendo's vetting process. It's just that the console itself was so different than the other two, most companies wouldn't put their flagship titles on it.
Re:Holy funding, splatman! (Score:4, Insightful)
...and the fact that working with Nintendo's console development group is such a nightmare that even seasoned development houses don't put the manpower into creating stuff for them BECAUSE they are so difficult to work with. They lost a ton of franchises because of it - Resident Evil, Final Fantasy, and a ton more won't even -ever- consider it because of the tales they've heard about it.
That works against you getting premium titles for your console when you cull your developers before they even get out of the starting gate. The ones that are left don't sink the manpower into flagship games that could get killed at any point by Nintendo to favor their own titles, release schedules, or even if they just don't like your game concept as it's evolving. Petty shit kills good products, and Nintendo has been stabbing a lot of people in the industry in the back over the years - it's just taken a while to catch up with them.
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You could at least try to fake you were replying to raydobb's post. Replying to the first poster just for the sake of placement is extremely lame IMHO.
Re:summed up in the summary (Score:5, Funny)
Re:summed up in the summary (Score:4, Funny)
What about replying to the reply of the ... aww, nuts, skip it.
55" tablet (Score:3, Informative)
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Yes, that was my first thought, you can of course already hook up a tablet/phone/Rikomagic to your TV and play Android games on the big screen. But I guess this console can stay permanently hooked up to the TV, which has some advantages, and if they can get enough units shipped, maybe developers will do some optimization with their controllers, as games developed for a touchscreen may not translate well to traditional sofa gaming.
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But I guess this console can stay permanently hooked up to the TV, which has some advantages
And it'll also come with a gamepad, which brings other advantages.
games developed for a touchscreen may not translate well to traditional sofa gaming.
Nor vice versa. Sofa gaming has traditionally been reserved for established companies, with indies limited to PC (mouse and keyboard, one player per machine, few players think to plug in a gamepad) or mobile (flat touch screen) platforms.
More recent games have controller support (Score:2)
Not all games support controllers, but 'higher end' ones do. I have three in particular - Max Payne, Shadowgun, and Dead Trigger. The graphics are pretty good - not much below current-gen consoles, actually. So long as more and more games support gamepads like that, I can see a n
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I have a HP Touchpad (got it during the fire sale) running CM9. I've installed an application (Sixaxis Controller) that allows my PS3 controller to connect via Bluetooth. I tested it out on a jetski racing game (Riptide GP) that I bought from the Google PLAY market. It works really well. It turns my touchpad into a portable gaming platform. I am not sure how many other games support a game controller as I've been busy playing Skyrim instead of tablet games...
Android terminal (Score:2)
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KBOX terminal.
http://kevinboone.net/kbox.html [kevinboone.net]
External keyboard support would be included if you have an android device that takes external keyboard. My understanding is anything past 2.2 should be able to use a bluetooth keyboard.
Is it still a scam? (Score:2)
Re:Is it still a scam? (Score:4, Informative)
Gamers are notorious armchair analysts who usually have no idea what they're talking about. (See: Xbox360 vs PS3 hardware power arguments when they were launched) Gamers should be cautious, mostly due to Kickstarter's sketchyness, but I don't see why this Kickstarter is any more suspect than other Kickstarters.
Ouya vs. $100 phones (Score:2)
It's an underpowered box that will be laughed out of the market because It's so underpowered and stupid that any Phone will be better than this box by the time it's released
Any phone, even the bargain-basement $100 phones that Virgin Mobile and other prepaid carriers sell? And would such a phone include a Bluetooth gamepad, or would games still rely on thumb swipe gestures?
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A Tegra 3 isn't all that underpowered; it would fit inside the spectrum of current-gen consoles. Faster than a Wii, slower than a 360, but closer to the 360 than the Wii. With that much RAM, porting a 360 or PS3 game shouldn't be terribly difficult, except for the obvious differences in APIs.
I'd be curious about the relative performance of the CPUs of the two. The 360 has, for game use (one core is reserved for OS) a dual-core in-order-execution 3.2GHz PowerPC. The Tegra 3 is a quad-core out-of-order execut
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The biggest reason why I didn't pledge anything is because they said units wouldn't be out til next March. That's a long time. When they get closer to actually releasing, I'll look into it again.
Scam-like points of note (Score:5, Interesting)
At a glance it seems legit, but on rereading, I had to wonder this myself:
This has a lot of "too-good-to-be-true" tempered by some things to make it seem reasonable. But with the promises made, I'm not sure. "Estimated Delivery: March 2013" is awfully soon to manufacture a console with presumably no prior hardware development experience. Do they have all their contracts already lined up? Is their software already developed? Just look how long it took to get the OpenPandora [wikipedia.org] out.
All of this starts making you wonder "wait, is this really legit?" I certainly can't say it's not, but it seems either naive or too good to be true.
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Right, this is one of the things I mean by "tempered". "Free-to-play" and "microtransactions" are buzzwords; they've proven to be successful business models in some cases, so this seems reasonable. The question is, do they already have titles lined up for launch? Contracts for their f2p store? With a 10-month launch window, they should have devkits out now. Most existing android games assume a touchscreen. You can't just drop those on a device with controller and screen.
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Promise of "killer" opening price-point of $99.
This one I don't see as being as big of a warning sign.
No screen; there goes a huge chunk of the cost of a typical Android device. No battery, no cell radios. No cameras. I think it's actually completely feasible to get a decently-spec'd piece of hardware running Android out for at most somewhere in the $150-$200 range, and quite possibly even sub-$100. This is going to be basically a CPU/GPU wired up to bluetooth, wifi, storage, and AV out. You can already get things like that for really cheap.
I mean
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The Wii shipped with essentially souped-up 5-year-old hardware and still cost $212 (JP) to $249 (US). The custom stuff should have been taken out of the equation by manufacturing volume. Just because the hardware exists doesn't obviate development and testing time. And they still have custom cases, controllers, etc. Nintendo shipped millions at launch. They have tens
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All of your points are completely sensible and on the money. But if we're being kind to them, you can justify some of them:
- Every game must have free-to-play content: they're basically demanding that all games must come with a demo, or follow the old Shareware model. Not that unreasonable.
- Android- it's only a buzzword if they're not using it. Android is a fairly sensible choice for what they're setting out to do, so it's not that weird that they've picked it.
- "Rooting"- they're just using the lingo. It
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Promise of "every game free-to-play".
It's not every game free-to-play, its that every game has to have some kind of free component. Like a demo.
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Can't speak for others, but it definitely has a "too good to be true" smell to it as far as I'm concerned.
Basically, it looks like a non-portable version of the GP32/GP2X of a few years back. The hardware turned out to suck, the "professional" games never materialized, leaving it as a sub-standard media player and a halfway decent 8-bit emulator system (16 bit was iffy. MegaDrive/Genesis was good, SNES was not).
Combined with a price point that seems to be made out of unicorn farts and pixie dust, I find mys
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The points in their favour is that they're using off-the-shelf software (Android) which already has a huge base of compatible hardware (via the existing Android devices). There's also already a lot of professional (albeit "causal") games for the platform, and a lot of game companies with established Android development teams.
On the price-point front- there are Android phones at or near $100 (not necessarily good ones). When you bear in mind that with a smartphone you're paying for a screen, touchscreen inte
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All of the devices you talked about are pre-andriod or really pre-smartphone. Which is exactly the point.
We now have a stable, massively popular, open source software platform.. And dozens of companies creating competitive commodity hardware for it.
And we had Linux before. None of the devices I mentioned had stability problems. They had hardware problems, sure (the stick on the GP2X was godawful), but their biggest problem was adoption.
As for crowd funded gaming? Wrong! There are a lot of crowd funded indy games that are popular right now. Minecraft comes to mind.
How many of them were around before the crowd-funding started? I know Minecraft was.
Cool tech... but... (Score:5, Insightful)
>after all the wisdom of crowds is never wrong
Really? Or was that sarcasm?
Here are the problems I foresee:
1) They're either selling the hardware at cost or taking a loss at $99. Big console manufacturers make it back on $60 games. It will be really tough to make it off 30% of 99c games.
2) Storage, 8 GB(minus OS space) is really low, and you don't want to be downloading from the cloud all the time. XBox gets away with a 4GB model because it has a DVD drive. Throw in a SD card slot atleast or a cheap SSD.
3) Hardware: The hardware seems woefully inadequate. Tegra 3 is okay for now but in 2013 when they actually launch? Also, it's not a good thing to upgrade hardware even every year because that will fragment the games, so that hardware at launch is a very important baseline.
4) And the last big thing: PATENTS. The big players and patent trolls will be all over this company by the time it even sees minimal success. With the controller looking very similar to the existing ones, expect a huge patent attack.
Anyway, nice to see an underdog coming up in the console games, but it's hard to understand why Google can't make something like this. They already have Google TV and they release something like the Nexus Q at $299?
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1). Why would they be taking a loss? Tegra 3 SoCs run I think $15, can be more than $50 worth of parts total. I bet chinese assembly gets it done cheap enough for a small profit on each. There is no need to make the kind of profit the big boys do, most businesses don't have those kinds of margins and still survive.
2). 8GB seems fine, they are not going for blockbuster games. sure an SD card would help
3). I disagree a Tegra 3 today will not get worse with age, it will still be "good enough". It could be bett
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2). 8GB seems fine, they are not going for blockbuster games. sure an SD card would help
Exactly. This article is about twenty ways wrong and misunderstands the gaming environment.
This won't increase competition because the developers who want DRM or other restrictions will continue to flock to Sony/Nintento/MS. It just so happens that most of the blockbuster developers go this route. This is probably going to end up as nothing more than perhaps a slightly more powerful smartphone for the purposes of gaming. At best it will compete with PCs for indie developers.
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I think this would be huge for OnLive, Netflix and a whole host of others that want to provide service to a cheap dumb endpoint.
It would also be big for indie devs and smaller game houses. I bet it could run all the Tell Tale games for instance. Not a huge dev, but their franchises are pretty historic. Sam and Max, Monkey Island, etc.
In short I am old and I think I would like to use this to play old games and new versions of said old games.
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The problem is the Ouya store will be just as bad as the Apple App Store, Google Play Store and Xbox Live Indie Arcade. Everyone and their dog will want to try to cash in on the action (and with a kickstarter like that... cha-ching) and release tons of crap ass games.
They'll have the numbers but if it's
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I run the telltale games on wine and don't have those issues. At least not so far, what platform are you using?
Rating a game before buying it (Score:2)
They'll have the numbers but if it's practically impossible to find the good ones in the pile among the junk
Hence the requirement of a free demo, so that players can download a game and rate it without having to spend anything. It's almost like the old days of cartridge based systems, where one would often rent games to see if they were any good before buying them.
8GB is actually a bit low, I'm afraid (Score:2)
Games that actually use that Tegra3 have to have textures and other art assets that take up space. I have 4 of the big 'Yay Tegra3' games for Android - Max Payne Mobile, Shadowgun THD, Dead Trigger, and Dark Meadow. Every one of them had a lengthy post-'install' download of around 1 GB each. That'd fill up over half that 8GB space.
I'd figure an SD card slot, or even an external USB drive connection, would be necessary in
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3) Hardware: The hardware seems woefully inadequate. Tegra 3 is okay for now but in 2013 when they actually launch? Also, it's not a good thing to upgrade hardware even every year because that will fragment the games, so that hardware at launch is a very important baseline.
I wouldn't say it's woefully inadequate. I think it would be similar to the way the Wii is underpowered compared to the PS3 and Xbox 360 right now. It's a cheap system, I wouldn't expect game-changing graphics... I would, however, expect there to be interesting games coming from the indie game crowd. Canabalt is a very simple game that is super fun to play. Super meat boy doesn't require a heck of a lot of computing power.
A vote against (Score:4, Interesting)
I think people like the convenience of consoles, mainly. Turn them on, and bang, you're playing in a moment. The locked-in hardware means that everything you run on it will be compatible, or updates will be auto-installed.
However, we've gotten sick of the console-makers' sense that somehow they OWN us as customers, and can reach further and further into our lives to control the console experience downstream.
If I mod my console, that's MY BUSINESS, not the hardware-sellers. I don't think anyone would object to the developers saying "ok then that voids your warranty" - that's fair. But when they push updates that then (pretty obviously deliberately) break modding, brick systems, and contrive to rope us back into their definition of what we should be doing with their systems, we resist and look for alternatives.
Which is why I hope this works, but its main impact will be in policy, not product. It's a vote against the proprietary walled-garden mentality of the big hardware makers. PERHAPS they'll see that a console player just wants to play the damned games, not become part of the dev's 'family'.
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However, we've gotten sick of the console-makers' sense that somehow they OWN us as customers, and can reach further and further into our lives to control the console experience downstream.
We have; most gamers and people in general have not. Note the immense popularity of consoles and console games, and other locked down vendor-controlled devices (cell phones, iPads, etc.).
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This is why in the last thread I suggested implementing alternative game marketplaces to PSN store and Xbox Live! Store.
What is really needed is something like "son of BNetD" for consoles, accessed by telling the console to connect through the service's special proxy portal. It tries to call the mothership, but gets the replacement service instead.
As far as I know, the container format and cryptographic mechanisms used on the 360 to sign packages has been known for awhile, and the ps3's loss of cryptographi
All I ask... (Score:3)
Is for C64 and Apple ][ emulators.
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Both already exist on android.
I bet if that is all you want you could right now get a cheap android tablet, bluetooth keyboard and mouse. hook that up to your TV and away you go.
Now we're talking (Score:2)
Next up: An Android Powered DVR with CableCard support.
Hey I can dream, right?
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If you are going to dream, dream a little bigger. CableCard needs to die.
Suckers. (Score:5, Insightful)
$2 million all for the price of a flashy presentation. Let me say this again, they just made $2 million in DONATIONS with 0 requirements to actually bring this device to market. Show of hands, how many people remember the Phantom console?
And people wonder where their money goes and why they are in so much debt...
I agree that the console market needs to have more open source contenders, but guess what, they HAVE contenders! There are plenty of open source / open hardware solutions that you can even build yourself! These solutions come with a variety of software options including Ubuntu and Android. Heck there are even a few portable handheld open consoles available. The difference is that these are actual devices for sale and not a list of shiny specs with no solid strategy for being profitable, especially at the $99 price point they mention.
One of these days I need to make a flashy shiny kickstarter presentation with a lot of loaded promises just so that I can cash out and retire early...
A Kickstarter Console for Kickstarter Games! (Score:5, Interesting)
Why did they need Kickstarter? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is sort of a recurring theme in a lot of Kickstarter projects -- why did this particular project need to go to Kickstarter?
If you look at their pitch video, clearly no expense was spared getting the Ouya to its current point. Fancy office space, dozens of designers/developers, Macs for everyone, etc. Somebody has pumped serious cash into this venture. So why do they have to beg common people for a mere million bucks to get this thing off the ground? Were they just going to give up if they didn't get the money? Somehow I doubt that.
I've never seen anyone raise that particular question about this project. They obviously have some deep-pocketed investors, so why do they have to beg for money from a bunch of regular Joes who will certainly feel the financial impact if this thing never comes to fruition?
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My point is, unless the pitch video is all BS, these guys already have secured millions from investors given that they have prototypes, dozens of employees, slick office space, etc.
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real life measure of your userbase? Not in term of "I promise I'll buy one!", but in term of "I already committed money to it!" ?
It seems a little late, though.
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It's way late for that. Obviously some investor has determined that the idea will attract enough users to make this thing a good investment. It's not like they're trying to attract VC, they've already got it (unless the video is all smoke and mirrors, of course).
And they're doing the same thing that so many other Kickstarter projects do, they're painting the fundraising as the only way this amazing, 99.9% complete project will ever see the light of day.
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In addition to that, they get actual input as to if people would want this
At this point, why does it matter? Clearly they've convinced some VC folks that this is a good investment. That's my whole point. They basically funded this entire thing (to the tune of several million I'm sure) and then feel compelled to ask regular people for a measly $1 million because...?
I get the idea of "advertising" but still find it funny that asking people for money is the same thing as advertising in this day and age. Couldn't they have announced details of this thing to the major tech sites,
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Um, did you watch their video? Clearly they have already secured tons of VC money. Which is my entire point, why do projects like this, that clearly have rich investors behind them, feel compelled to go to the masses for money?
I just want to see what happens.. (Score:2)
Will this burst the Kickstarter bubble? (Score:2)
One of these days someone is going to post a project that generates millions and then not offer a product to market, I have a feeling this might be one of them.
Sure, someone might be able to slap together an android powered prototype and ship it to project contributors to appease them that "something" was accomplished. Of course the box probably won't work well or as proposed.
But at what point does a kickstarter project be declared fraud? What are the ramifications of taking millions from contributors and
The Reality (Score:2)
Once the once potentially great console starts to gather momentum , gathering the interests of investors, larger game studios and so forth. Once money is on the cards the ideals of a completely open and hackable console will slowly start to become less important.
Somebody has to make money from this and to stand a real chance of success it has to have the backing of major game studios. The console will need some killer apps , maybe even exclusive titles. Without it this will end up just a hackers dream. I im
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So they beat you until you stopped being able to work?
Or was your game not good enough to get actual sales. Remember than the cost of entry to pirate is infinitely lower than to buy.
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I think you might want to try a less crowded field. There are tons of those style of racing games, some that have very good art that no single developer could ever compete with.
As an example: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.polarbit.RecklessRacing [google.com]
Your game may be 100 times better, but these guys have the shiny. In a crowded market the shiny counts for a lot.
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Are you trolling or stupid?
All my android devices are rooted, I have pirated exactly 0 applications or videos or movies.
Why would anyone need an excuse to own their own devices?
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I posted as AC by mistake... but yes I am an independent game developer (not hard to find these days with mobile devices).
And I am not trolling or stupid... I just need to Google my games to know they are available for free and being copied. I have data from my transactions and number of what countries buy or download my games. I can tell that although Americans buy a lot but this is not true for other countries. For instance, one of my games has sold almost less copies than there are download sites with cr
Re:Piracy (Score:4, Insightful)
So what?
I mean that seriously, you are not losing money, it is no different than if someone did not buy the game. I know that sounds harsh, but the reality is every minute you spend worrying about people like that is one less you can spend getting actual customers. To an indie dev, I would suggest making a version to post on such websites. Change some models/sprites/backgrounds to pirates or zombies or something, and leave out the ending. This way it will at least be harder for people to find the pirated full version and you will get free advertising.
Spend more time making it worth me buying and less time worrying about what broke folks do. Some people will never give you their money, don't worry about what you can't change. Worry about getting those of us who might give you money to actually do so.
Please also tell me what game it is so I can go check it out.
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I obviously agree with that... but achieving it is harder than it sounds. I was just moaning and ranting on my first post anyway.
I posted the game link on another reply
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2972173&cid=40615803 [slashdot.org]
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I just saw that. Not my style but looks pretty nice. I like the lack of crazy permissions.
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I mean that seriously, you are not losing money
Except you don't know that. For one, actually making the shit has costs associated with it. I know the pirate lobby likes to keep saying how "digital distribution doesn't cost anything!" but that's ignoring the fact that there are costs with creating it in the first place. Further, the game could have some online component, in which case the pirates are costing him in bandwidth.
Not American? Your money is no good here (Score:2)
I can tell that although Americans buy a lot but this is not true for other countries.
How much of this is because a lot of countries didn't have paid apps for the first year or so that Android Market was in operation? Lack of support for paid apps in some countries has driven a lot of Android application developers to either A. derive revenue from ads instead of payments, especially after the success of Rovio's Angry Birds, or B. handle their own payment processing for unknown-source APK downloads.
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Well... you cna get it and judge for yourself
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.po.pequenosvelozesttr [google.com]
There is a free demo version with you don't have a dollar
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.po.pequenosvelozesttrdemo [google.com]
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Someone who is willing to pirate a game (or music, or video), isn't going to go pay for one simply because it's good. Do you think people pirate crappy games, but go out and pay retail for the good ones? Do you think people pirate Episodes I-III and VI, but buy the DVD of Episodes IV and V?
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Way to miss the point.
Good games are bought by people unlikely to pirate, and pirated by those likely to do that. Bad games are not bought by those who are unlikely to pirate and pirated by those who are likely to do that.
In college I knew people who pirated only to have huge collections of stuff they never used. We called them digital packrats.
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Piracy is a matter of cost and convenience. Piracy is always free, but sometimes it's incredibly inconvenient. Sometimes it's even risky. Purchasing should always have the advantage in quality and convenience. So in the long run, content providers should always win. But sometimes they screw it up and make piracy attractive. And it's often easier for content producers to blame piracy for their woes than to address the problem of piracy offering a better experience.
If purchasing the game is much easier than p
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Seriously, this attitude is pure horseshit. When shit is available for free, it isn't shocking that most people would rather get it for free than pay for it, regardless of how worth it the title is.
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Piracy after Other OS was taken away (Score:2)
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Yes, but those big companies are usually able to weather the piracy rates much better. They generally have bigger fanbases, as people know what they're getting into. An indie dev has no such luxury.
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So, what are your thoughts on PC gaming?
Major labels have reasons to avoid the PC (Score:2)
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Those are living room games, the PC is probably a bad place to put them.
For the best of both worlds an emulator is so far the only way to go. This device might change that.
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Fighting games require some sort of control pad (they're not really practical on a keyboard), which really limits the potential market for a PC fighting game. Even for consumers who also own a console, no major console ships with a controller that works with a PC out of the box (PS3 requires third party custom drivers/software, 360 wireless controller requires special dongle, wiimote requires third party custom drivers/software).
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Is there a good excuse for a "hackable" console device other than being able to do piracy of multiple types of content?
Being able to use it for purposes other than the original intended one? Look at the original Xbox: Hacking it got us XBMC, one of the better living room PC setups of the time. That later evolved to Roku.
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Yes, a brand new project with little to no details, no actual work done so far, no actual design just a theory ...
While I agree that it could just be a scam, they actually claim to have a working prototype.
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Citation [wikipedia.org] granted [urbandictionary.com]
Rhythm games, for example (Score:2)
Why you would want to play a press button X now to make the movie continue game I am not sure.
Yet people play a press buttons X, Y, and Z in the displayed sequence to make the song continue game. Such games go by the titles Parappa, Dance Dance Revolution, Amplitude, and Rock Band.
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You left out Space Channel 5. You should be ashamed.
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To me they all suck.
I like playing a game, not doing what the box says to do.
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Play the game before you bitch about it. Clearly you've no idea what the game is like.
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I tried to play it, I stopped when I realized it was the press X now to jump in a preprogramed way and press Y now to execute yet another scripted action game.
I want to be able to try stuff, to explore, to you know play, not watch a movie that sometimes makes me press continue.
Nobody actually does that (Score:2)