Microconsoles

[Tom Guycott]

Now that I've spent some time with my OUYA, and the research that went down before and during, I came to realize that this is an upcoming *thing*: a tide of smaller, cheaper (for most; in theory) Android-based consoles running mostly as an indy dev outlet, with the most tangable among them so far being OUYA (only one released thus far), GameStick (getting a bit of pub from GameStop), and the NVidia Shield (which sorta-kinda doesn't count: it's more like a tablet with a built in controller to make it a handheld, plus it is slated to be way more expensive), GamePop (still don't know much about this one), and the MadCatz MOJO.

My question is what anyone here thinks about them... or even if they think about them at all?

[Kalyx triaD]

Kinda lame.

[Kane Knight]

Didn't Archos' "microconsole" come out before the Ouya? I didn't pay much attention after the launch announcement, but it was supposed to have been long out by now.

Anyway, the Ouya shows many of the flaws within the concept. People aren't particularly buying Ouya-specific games, those games are coming to PC, and nobody seems to care much. It's cool that you can play Angry Birds or whatever floats your boat on your TV, but you can probably do that with your smartphone/tablet anyway.

From an amateur-programmer/nerd perspective, it's kind of neat to have an open-source "console" in the vein of the microPC (which in itself is nothing new), but considering the existing line it's hard to see that as much more than a novelty. I don't know how embraced this even is, because I don't care enough.

This sort of low-end microPC already exists and usually runs about a hundred bucks or so. To include a controller and make it fiscally feasible, they had to cut corners. That's a bad start, and reviews show that bad start in action. I don't know enough about the technical end to know how it differs from Android-specific coding, but the fact that you have both cheap Android and Linux units makes me wonder why anyone thought there was a particular niche.

Maybe the other concepts will work better. Shield is a different approach, though it looks dumb from what little I've seen, too.

[whiteyford]

If they were cheap enough I'd pick one up for the novelty, was impressed with Raspberry Pi for what it was, but it really would just be as a novelty I think.