This gentlemen is going to be the first big league failure of the whole non sense kick start project. The concept in general sounds fine but the detail shows just how badly it will fail.
First a home console cannot survive on just being a one hit wonder, a system that only plays games and only plays Android games will fall over very quickly.
Second you go to the effort of hooking up a home console to your TV or various enterinment system you want to be playing games a tad more substantial than the majority non sense that appears on the Android market, oh yeah their is some quality games there but they are distraction titles, games designed to keep you entertained on the bus ride in to work and even those are a minority and of that minority even less of them are worthy of being played on a home TV system. I am not gonna hook up a console to my TV to dip in to a game for ten minutes.
Third it has to go up a huge market of tablets and smart phones that already do the job very well.
Fourth this is a combo issue. They say you can hack the console to make it do what you want to do, well nice in theory but if you want to create a gaming user base you need to have a system that has at least some commanility, gaming on Android is already a big enough pain in the arse with the variant of devices that run it combined with the number of versions of Android, do the people who play consoles want to be dealing with THAT kind of nonsense? Not really
They then state that the game itself has to have some element of free play, now that's a big issue. A console game needs to have a degree of substance to it, like I said I am gonna go to the trouble of hooking up a console to my TV I want to be playing a game for a few hours at a time not a game that was designed to distract me for 15 minutes or so. To create games that do this you need money, you need a development team behind you and to do that you need to have a ready source of cash and if that cash return is to come from the game you are developing then having, BEING FORCED, to release free parts of the game for the console that claims to allow you to do whatever you want with it? Well that's a great way to alienate a potential developer base, especially when they could just go away and develop the same game for any one of the countless smart phones or tablets and NOT have to release ANY free content.
Fifth a console, in fact any modern piece of tech requires support, doesn;t matter what the intentions are but in the long run it needs someone to manage the SDKs, manage the content delivery, manage the update distributions, manage warranty and returns and that's just the stuff that I can think of off hand. You seriously think that someone using kickstarter has the backing to manage even a fraction of this?
The free source console model sounded crazy when it was being batted about as something Valve where going to do, but at least Valve have the cash, resource and infrastructure to have pulled it off. This is going to be a big league kickstart failure folk, just remember that I said it!
other than of course the initial 99 dollar cost? advertisements?
