Comment by programminggeek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by programminggeek | Hacker News Reader

programminggeek

I think that it's a bit surprising that a company like say SEGA or EA or whoever hasn't got together and put out a gamer-oriented Apple/GoogleTV type device. Think Apple TV size that used existing bluetooth PS3 or Wii controllers or controllers designed for the system.

Certainly with dual/quad core chipsets, we are close to or past the power of the Wii and if there was a better industry standard around such things you could even create a kind of built-in "meta console" platform within TV's. Then you don't even have to buy a separate device, your TV just plays games as long as you have a controller. That would probably sell more HDTV's than 3-D TV technology would.

All I know is if you can get an ARM chipset that can reliably spit out 720p games at 30fps with reasonably good quality, built into a TV that had say 10,000 games available for under $10 (I'm looking at you iOS and Android), parents woudln't buy their kids 360's or PS3's. They'd just buy apps that run on their tv.

How is that different at all from the online distribution systems that the PS3, 360, and Wii already have? The 360 has a fantastic low price indie market in Xbox Live Arcade, the PS3 does pretty well, and the Wii is steadily gaining the entire Nintendo back catalog.

What would people gain from buying yet another device, and what do you mean by a "meta console"? Something like OnLive? Because otherwise, you're not going to see anywhere near the performance that the current consoles get. While graphics don't make the game, shiny graphics do help to sell games.

"How is that different at all from the online distribution systems that the PS3, 360, and Wii already have?"

The product that the parent post describes is priced like an impulse buy ($99), has no monthly fee , integrates beautifully with millions of popular devices (Airplay with iTunes, iPads, iPhones, iPods) and Apple would make it as trivial as possible to port games/apps from their already popular platforms to the new TV format... If they indeed keep the pricing as cheap as Apple TV, it could be practically ubiquitous and the network effects for social games and Facetime-like apps would thus be a major competitive edge.

I don't think it's hard to imagine Apple disrupting the consoles. Of course, it's more likely that they'll try to stay intensely focused on their two existing platforms for the foreseeable future. Then again, I have a feeling that the merging of Android with Google TV makes the marriage of iOS and Apple TV more likely - they know that the home's "big screen" is a future battleground for these platforms.

The AppleTV is already iOS behind the scenes (and uses the same A4 chipset as the current iPhone and iPod touch). Technically, it'd be possible to run iOS games on the Apple TV nearly unmodified, and use your other iOS devices as controllers. Also, the iPad 2 will be able to do full video mirroring over the network to the Apple TV as of iOS 5; presuming the performance is up to spec it'd be possible to "invade" living room gaming that way as well.

"Certainly with dual/quad core chipsets, we are close to or past the power of the Wii"

The best mobile phones are not quite as powerful as the XBox 360 or the PS3, but from what I see, they've already got the Wii beat quite handily. Remember, not only does the Wii tend to look less good than the XBox 360/PS3, it's doing it at a much lower resolution, too.

In fact I've been spending my last few nights playing Persona 4, one of the last games that came out for the PS2, and if I saw that on the Wii I wouldn't exactly be surprised by the low quality or anything. There's a reason they could sell the Wiis at a profit for $250 right out of the gate, with several tens of those dollars actually going to the controller packed with it. It isn't actually that powerful.

Maybe it isn't common knowledge, but I remember people making those claims from the start; that Wii is about as powerful as two GameCubes lashed together.

Some "converging" devices already exist: the freebox Revolution ( http://www.free.fr/adsl/ ) is first an ADSL router, but also a NAS, a game console, a Blu-ray player, video streaming client and server, IP telephone, with a built-in browser for couch surfing too, and it comes with a basic 30€/month ADSL line to quite a lot of people.

Actually, the router/NAS and set-top-box are two separate devices.

And unfortunately the browser is crap. :-(

Yes, I just meant that there probably isn't any real market for someone selling these devices at a premium, because soon they'll come free with any ADSL plan or any TV anyway.

Some of the newer televisions out have built-in HTML5 functionality and a few folks are already making games for them this way.

Currently they're using the remote control for input, but if they could access USB devices properly they could utilise the 360 USB dongle to take input.

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