> The gaming aspect of this will make it a winner. OUYA's big problem is that it didn't do streaming and was a bit clunky. Amazon has a big game library and just needs controller support.
I think the gaming aspects are the worst part and are entirely useless. Who wants to casual game with an underpowered box on a giant TV screen? Goofy games are fun on a 4-7" screen because expectations are low. On my TV I expect a crazy immersive experience, not "Candy Crush".
Perhaps they would have been better served by spending their time getting HBO-Go, Starz/Encore and Spotify all hooked into their little box. If they want to be the central hub for all things "media" and want to compel people to move off of their existing platform ( Roku and ATV ) it seems like they need to offer a more complete package.
comparing Wii games to phone games is a bit of a stretch. They might be more casual than xbox and ps4, but they are far bigger and better than than phone games. Mario, zelda, candy crush, which one of these is not like the others.
Wii didn't just sell Mario games though, it also sold a plethora of carnival games and the like. I mean, the bundled title was Wii Sports, and they made huge splashes with Wii Fit and Wii Music.
And meanwhile, there are phone games that are comparable to the big headline titles of the Wii etc - Bard's Tale, Oil Rush, GTA, etc.
If Amazon pushes the gamepad hard for the Fire TV, we could definitely see it in that space.
Yeah, but I'd buy a lot more "Nintendo-like" casual-ish games if they were $5 a pop instead of $60. Add the fact I can sit comfortably on the couch with my wife and play, and I'm in.
I just hope there are enough 2 player games worthwhile.
Perhaps they would have been better served by spending their time getting HBO-Go, Starz/Encore and Spotify all hooked into their little box
Give it time. These are usually 3rd party apps not built by the provider of the platform (as a note, my company just finished building Starz/Encore/Movieplex Play for Xbox 360). The important thing is that Amazon provides an Ecosystem,it just needs some time for all the other offerings to get on there.
The SDK is a big deal. According to the page, existing Android code should just work. Some tweaking may be necessary to properly support the controller(s) and fitting to a 1080p screen.
I'm looking forward to XBMC or other local streaming software coming to the platform. If that happens, this will literally be the ultimate set top box for me.
"Who wants to casual game with an underpowered box on a giant TV screen?"
Young kids. There are lots of them about.
PS4 is very expensive. iPads are expensive, fragile, don't have user accounts, and you can't keep an eye on what's on screen from the kitchen while cooking dinner after school.
Ouya's other problem was the selection of games. Most of the games on the play store have controller support. You're talking candy crush, I'm thinking emulators and titles like GTA, Modern Combat, Minecraft, and many other rpg and fps titles.
I wouldn't knock it until you tried it. The graphics for games like Bard's Tale and many others are pretty damn good on mobile devices. We all have great mobile gaming experiences, wouldn't it be awesome if you could share that with anyone you had over on a big screen?
You may expect a "crazy immersive experience" but I would venture a guess that you are not the casual mobile gamer.
Does the casual mobile gamer want their casual mobile game on a giant screen? Isn't part of the allure of mobile games that they are private, games that you play in your hand? Why would someone want these broadcast to a giant screen? Does that add any enjoyment?
To me, the Wii U was a failure in this regard. They tried to marry the "fun game in my hand" with the "fun game on the big screen" and the result was a messy, confusing experience.
Possibly. Some games won't cross over well, or at all. For instance, Fruit Ninja wouldn't work. Angry Birds would. Tap Tap Revenge or whatever wouldn't. Etc.
One thing to keep in mind is mobile is a form factor, but no longer a "platform." In this case, the platform is Android. There are plenty of game types that would cross over well. Even better if you could sync state between platforms for a seamless anywhere experience. Imagine playing FFVII on your phone, and then when you get home pick up a PS2 like controller and continue playing that same game on your HDTV?
I think the biggest hurtle is the fact that consumers already have similar devices, and at $99 its not like the FireTV is a no-brainer. If they timed it right, and people are "rolling over" to the next set of devices?
have you ever tried playing regular games with virtual controls and buttons on a touch screen. Your fingers slide all over the place. For most titles it borders on unusable. The amount of touch focused titles are actually small in comparison.
Who wants to casual game with an underpowered box on a giant TV screen? Goofy games are fun on a 4-7" screen because expectations are low. On my TV I expect a crazy immersive experience, not "Candy Crush".
Infinity Blade, Real Racing, etc. show you CAN get "crazy immersive experience" (or near enough thereto that 95% of users won't notice a difference) on a "phone". Given an iPad Mini (retail replacement cost $250 so you know it costs less than that to make) take away the HD+ display, touchscreen, cellular radio, battery, speakers, mic, and most of the flash storage, and you've got a sub-$99 dual-core 64-bit box that ALL your iOS games - from Candy Crush to Infinity Blade III - can run on right now ... and anything you get for that big screen can, in turn, run on your phone when Mom says you have to get in the car and you want to take the in-progress game with you.
Why do you assume underpowered? My iPad 4, which is a few years old now has amazing graphics at higher than HD resolution. I don't know enough about the processors to compare them directly, but I don't see any reason to count out the Fire TV.
By making it easy to port Android apps they could do well with this.
The midrange SoCs found in boxes like this have a surprising amount of power. They are capable of powering games with graphical fidelity that falls somewhere in between the PS2 and PS3. Plus they aren't as RAM starved as those consoles.
The market has so far been defined by the capabilities of mobile devices. That means simplified controls and gameplay designed for short sessions. There's no technical reason for these limitations in the streaming box market, OUYA failed and Amazon might fail but the market still exists. Consumers have bought tens of millions of these devices just to watch TV, eventually someone will be able to expand to tap the couch gaming market. The price point is low, install base high, and the processing power is just sitting there and waiting.
The box has a snapdragon 600 chip in it, so not exactly underpowered. They also seem to be addressing the 'immersive' segment more than 'Candy Crush' type of games - they mention Asphalt 8 will be supported soon and Amazon has been hiring/acqui-hiring AAA-title devs for broader support since a while now.
There are some big, immersive games on Android. Granted, they're very few now, simply because playing them on a touch screen is not great and playing with a controller on a phone is clunky.
But if the Fire TV gets enough traction there could be more "real" games on Android.
How is the simple inclusion of the feature the "worst aspect"? You don't have to play games on the device, of course. They didn't force the controller with the base purchase. Given that it's Android powered, I suspect they didn't have to spend much engineering effort on making it capable of playing games.
Also, don't sell mobile gaming short. There are current generation mobile chipsets capable of PS3 level graphics (especially given that many smartphones now have a resolution greater than that big television), and in this case they don't even have to live within the power bounds of a battery power deviced, opening up the high end (they claim it's a "dedicated" GPU, which is an odd phrasing in the era of SoCs).
PS3 level graphics are beyond satisfactory for a huge range of gaming genres (especially given that many of the PS3s limitations were courtesy of the 256MB/256MB memory limit).
As a more than casual android gamer I'm not sure I would call the graphics ps3 quality. Perhaps on a small screen some of these games look nice (like modern combat series and nova) but when playing on a tv at 1080p the lack of definition of textures and overall quality is very aparent.
mobile games are much closer to ps2. Gta3 was released for ps2 and now runs on android. My experience with gta3 wasn't a smooth one, although maybe a galaxy s5 would have a more consistent/smoother experience.
I feel like we have a ways before we get to true ps3 graphics. But I also agree not to discredit mobile games. For the price (about $140) and all the other benefits you recieve from the streaming video offerings, doesn't seem like a bad deal to me.
Well, PS2 with much higher definition. That's part of the problem comparing Android gaming graphics to consoles... they're high-definition but comparable to SD-era consoles like the Wii and PS2.
I was speaking more to the capabilities of the hardware than specific games or apps, and it is absolutely true that most games optimize for the lower end (in vertex count and texture size), so they don't really show off the high end. As higher end hardware becomes more commonplace the standard moves up, especially for things like models and textures that are simply resources that can vary.
In this case while I was hoping it would be something really compelling like a Tegra K1, it's a 1.7Ghz quad-core Krait 300 APQ8064 with Adrena 320 graphics. That pushes about 225 million triangles per second, while the PS3 pushes 275 million. The PS2 pushed about 35 million. Of course triangles per second is an entirely incomplete metric, though the PS3 and the Snapdragon feature similar memory bandwidth (and fill rate), though the PS3 has dedicated video memory while the Snapdragon shares it with the CPU.
Overhead of Android and OpenGL ES eats into this significantly of course, but the fact that such a comparison is at all viable is pretty incredible.
> The gaming aspect of this will make it a winner. OUYA's big problem is that it didn't do streaming and was a bit clunky. Amazon has a big game library and just needs controller support.
I think the gaming aspects are the worst part and are entirely useless. Who wants to casual game with an underpowered box on a giant TV screen? Goofy games are fun on a 4-7" screen because expectations are low. On my TV I expect a crazy immersive experience, not "Candy Crush".
Perhaps they would have been better served by spending their time getting HBO-Go, Starz/Encore and Spotify all hooked into their little box. If they want to be the central hub for all things "media" and want to compel people to move off of their existing platform ( Roku and ATV ) it seems like they need to offer a more complete package.