Yeah. That price really doesn’t seem bad when you factor that it comes with 12 games.
The relevant bit on the page is
All twelve games in Season One will be included — there’s no extra charge.
Sounds like they will charge some sort of seasonal pass for games.
It’ll be interesting to see if you can buy individual games, and past seasons.
Since the price of the system includes the first season free, then seasons will probably be reasonably priced. The seasonal pass system sounds like a good system provided they aren’t too precious about it. It would be a shame if they don’t have some sort of model to let you purchase games that have already been released.
watching nerds at work try to dunk on this thing like it is the Jaguar shortly after admitting they bought a launch Ouya is some nerdenfreude, I tell you wut.
Looking at the specs again… why does this thing have Bluetooth? I get wifi, but Bluetooth? I guess if you want to use wireless headphones, sure, but if I were trying to keep costs down and battery life up, Bluetooth is the first feature I’d axe.
that and I think the quality of the actual games will determine whether or not the price is justified but they do have some pretty cool people involved on that front.
if the build quality ends up being shitty or whatever I obviously will feel differently but we’ll see
I’m not sure where you folks are getting the idea that this’ll be a closed platform. According to a Panic employee posting on Resetera, they want homebrew on it and will let you side-load games onto the device any time (source).
None of that was made explicit on the official page which refers only to the curated library, so that’s probably where folks are getting that from. The resetera link is literally the first I’ve seen where they encourage homebrew.
they even cited the high reverb/ebay prices on the op1 when announcing the relaunch and we all assumed that this new run would help people not have to pay those prices
instead they just matched those high prices that people were selling for argh
more on topic: I do actually feel like the launch of a new game console not from an established company is met with a lot of ennui from people who aren’t intimately acquainted with game dev these days, kind of like the launch of a new game engine would be, just because the burden of proof is so high on the part of the people making the thing
like, my ideal situation is the pico-8 stuff but with an aim toward putting it on a console with the same form factor/functionality as the GBA
pico 8 is still interesting for sure but it’s also, to most people, Just A Game Dev Tool
so maybe de-emphasizing open source and closing the platform goes some way toward pushing it away from that initial ennui? who knows