Two open gaming platform efforts

Posted Jan 23, 2007 17:55 UTC (Tue) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

To claim that they "actively decided" seems to be a stretch. Gathering this data would be difficult at this time. Perhaps you could try polling a large number of people who play games and ask about their views at different times and so on. I'm certainly no expert on statistics and surveys but I think such data seeking for retroactive view information would be hard to generate in a reliable way.

If you simply read that as I do, though, it can be readily agreed with. I view it as a sloppy way of phrasing "the pc gaming market has been steadily shrinking while the console gaming market has been more rapidly growing." This can be borne out with relatively easy-to-acquire sales figures. I leave the acquisition of such figures as an exercise to the doubting reader.

Posted Jan 23, 2007 18:07 UTC (Tue) by elanthis (subscriber, #6227) [Link]

Don't know about "most," but I certainly have. PCs are too much of a pain in the ass to deal with and are far too expensive if you want to game. It's still way cheaper to just buy a PS3 at $600 than to buy a PC capable of playing newly released games throughout the life-span of the PS3.

Combine that with long boot-up time, installation hassle, manual patching, OS instabilities, hardware incompatibilities, and tons of other painful components of PC gaming. Why put up with that when you can just stick a disc in your console, turn it on, and be playing a very stable game in under a minute?

Posted Jan 23, 2007 20:40 UTC (Tue) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

Hmm, I'm not so sure that it is time to be counting those chickens. They are mostly open source games. The games mostly run on pre-existing windows and/or linux deployments. It would be hard to find a Gamix-compliant machine that did not already run windows or linux. Maybe the imac and/or mac pro might fit the bill?

This seems to be a PC-booter approach to PC-gaming. One of the major advantages of PC gaming is that you can use your system for other things in parallel, such as email or chat or whatever common applications get used in sync with gaming. I suppose VOIP applications are really the killer apps at the moment although I suspect they will become more folded into games over time. So call me a doubter on their whole concept, although I could easily turn out to be wrong.

But still, I wonder if they are licensing the right to ship Nvidia's drivers or if they are hoping Nvidia will turn a blind eye. And of course will anyone feel like filing a lawsuit over the GPL legal gray area each and every Gamix image will fall into.

Posted Jan 24, 2007 14:37 UTC (Wed) by wertigon (guest, #42963) [Link]

While there are many compliant Gamix machines, I don't think Gamix really could be considered a console - the specification is too loose. The main advantage to develop for a console is that you can play a game anywhere and it'll just work. None of this "Oh, I'm sorry sir, your system has X and Y which are known to have buggy drivers" crap that you see all too often on PC. Right now I see nothing in Gamix that will prevent that from happening to them, and I think they'll run into that wall quite soon.

OGCC on the other hand is trying to make this work by developing a specific console that can run the "Core OS" or a firmware. It's design is rigid and set in stone, so the "Play Anywhere" trait that all consoles share will be much easier to uphold. IMO that will be the key, but then again, I could be wrong. Only time will tell. :)