Can Digital TV Games Make It In The States? 21
Thanks to GameZone for their interview with Colin Anderson of developers Denki, as they discuss "if interactive TV can succeed in the gaming world", following Denki's continued UK releases of games played on set-top TV-receiving boxes, with titles including Denki Blocks and an updated Super Breakout. Denki's Anderson suggests: "It's not that digital TV games haven't been successful in North America, it's simply that they haven't been available up until recently... the US [is] around 12-18 months behind Europe", and also points out the different target audience for the format: "The interactive television audience tends to be 50-55% female with the most popular age ranges being under 12 and over 30. It's a real challenge from a designer's point of view to build a product that appeals equally across such a wide demographic." Would you play games on your digital TV box?
Interactive TV (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Interactive TV (Score:1)
Oh well, I guess the fact that I just now realized this means that I don't normally watch TV on thursday nite, either.
[OT] D&G (Score:2, Insightful)
Train wreck. (Score:2)
For that matter, the train being wrecked was ABC. Sub-UPN-quality sitcoms like this helped sink that network.
Pah (Score:3, Informative)
A few of the quiz games are interesting and sometimes the programme tie-ins are fun but as for playing proper games; the "platform" just doesn't allow for reliable real-time interaction. There's like a 1/2 second delay on button presses for gawd's sake.
Anyway, the picture quality in Digital televsion doesn't match a good analogue signal (though maybe your HDTVs over there will allow something better?)
Re:Pah (Score:1)
Only a small non-gaming market (Score:5, Informative)
It seems a bit like the N-gage. Games on cellphones are handy only if you don't have a gameboy sp. If my cell phone has a bundled game, I might play it once in a while if I forget my gameboy, but I wouldn't buy something like the N-gage just to play games. Similar with this. If my cable box had games and I didn't have a console I might waste some time on those games, but with a dedicated console, who needs it.
Idle N-gage point - when I was flying Delta this week coming back from Florida they announced that all cellphones and all cellphone games had to remain off for the entire flight. Another nail in the N-gage coffin...
Re:Only a small non-gaming market (Score:2)
for other s60 phones(7650,3650) there are software to turn it into 'flight mode'(you need to remove sim though also), so that it doesn't transmit.
anyways, as for the tv games.. you'd be surprised how popular sms based (very expensive to play in the long run!) tv games can be on tv, alongsid
Re:Only a small non-gaming market (Score:2)
For Delta though, they don't distinguish between flight mode and not. They have no real way to test every kind of cellphone to see if the radio's off or not, so they've enacted a universal ban on all cellphones operating during all flights.
Of course with the upcoming wireless gameboy adapters and the Sony PSP it'll be interesting to see if they get hit with a u
Re:Only a small non-gaming market (Score:2)
hmm.
they should make some lead shielded small sections of the plane for people to use whatever they please...
Lessons from iTunes (Score:1)
not worth the money (Score:2)
8-10 months? (Score:2)
UltimateTV offered the same, so did AOL TV; and so does DirecTV Interactive and Dish Interactive.
It's not that we're behind, quite the converse, we have had "interactive tv". It's just that no one ever saw it as more than a cheap gimmic. It turns out, most people *don't* want to play along with their favorite quiz show, and they *can* use
Interactive TV is an oxymoron (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:It sucks. (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
They were moderatly successful in the US (Score:2)
On Americast you could play these games on the network, against other people. I found myself playing at peoples houses when we would get together. It was at least as fun as playing at a sports bar.
The price was included in the digital cable tier.