How are we going to make a lot of money?

[dimag0g]

You would then just be building an Homer Simpson car with lots of cool stuff that end up being useless for 99.99% of people, resulting in a horrible device. Please, no.

So you're against features unrelated to primary Pandora usage as gaming/emulation handheld? Not just those that increase cost or drain too much current, but against any of them which make it Homer-car?

 

[klapse]

"We" are not going to make a lot of money on the Pyra. "We" are going to spend a lot of money on the Pyra.

Ed and his investors are the only ones who will make money on the Pyra, if anyone will. Silly thread.

 

[ekianjo]

You would then just be building an Homer Simpson car with lots of cool stuff that end up being useless for 99.99% of people, resulting in a horrible device. Please, no.

So you're against features unrelated to primary Pandora usage as gaming/emulation handheld? Not just those that increase cost or drain too much current, but against any of them which make it Homer-car?

I'm against stuff that does not make sense, against stuff that will increase failure modes for no good reason and stuff that will only be used by 0.0001% of the users.

If we start putting all sorts of gadgets inside the Pyra for no reason, there's no end to it and all crazy suggestions can become acceptable. Where do you draw the line ? 

Design is about making choices, not about putting as much as you can inside a tiny box. 

 

[Natsu]

Tell smartphone makers that.

 

[ekianjo]

Tell smartphone makers that.

a smartphone has a different use. For starters.

 

[Natsu]

Tell smartphone makers that.

a smartphone has a different use. For starters.

Pyra as multiple uses and can even be used as a phone.

 

[ekianjo]

Tell smartphone makers that.

a smartphone has a different use. For starters.

Pyra as multiple uses and can even be used as a phone.

why dont you buy a phone then?

 

[Natsu]

Pyra as multiple uses and can even be used as a phone.

why dont you buy a phone then?

 You already quoted my answer. I would be with the Pyra.

 

[ekianjo]

its not because it can that you would use it this way.

 

[quadcricket]

I may be a tad late to this thread but I do have a couple of ideas that would make Pyra money.


1. Appeal to education. There are currently no boxed "Be a game developer!" kits that I'm aware of. RedHat Linux made money by selling a book and support. Pyra could do the same. I paid $600+ to get into game development with the Pandora because it is accessible. Schools and home educators would pay more.


2. Offer a paid subcription. Pyra/Pandora need to be the epicenter of homebrew. While the games are free (mostly) the serices Dragonbox could provide are not. See if your friends are online, what your faveorite devs are doing, enter contests, play/buy games for charity, and get a digital magazine monthly are just a few things that could be offered.

 

[ekianjo]

1. Appeal to education. There are currently no boxed "Be a game developer!" kits that I'm aware of.

wrong, there are precisely these kind of things developed with the Raspberry Pi. They even had a kickstarter campaign not too long ago. The Pyra will be too expensive for that purpose anyway. 

RedHat Linux made money by selling a book and support. Pyra could do the same.

RedHat sold support to corporations, not to consumers. That's a totally different market.  

Schools and home educators would pay more.

You'll be surprised how tight the schools budgets are. At least most of them.  

See if your friends are online, what your faveorite devs are doing, enter contests

we are alredy doing all of these with the IRC, the boards and the competitions we have here. I wonder how you want to make people pay for services which are already free.  

and get a digital magazine monthly are just a few things that could be offered.

Which magazine ? WHo's writing it ? 

 

[quadcricket]

1. Appeal to education. There are currently no boxed "Be a game developer!" kits that I'm aware of.

wrong, there are precisely these kind of things developed with the Raspberry Pi. They even had a kickstarter campaign not too long ago. The Pyra will be too expensive for that purpose anyway. 

RedHat Linux made money by selling a book and support. Pyra could do the same.

RedHat sold support to corporations, not to consumers. That's a totally different market.  

Schools and home educators would pay more.

You'll be surprised how tight the schools budgets are. At least most of them.  

See if your friends are online, what your faveorite devs are doing, enter contests

we are alredy doing all of these with the IRC, the boards and the competitions we have here. I wonder how you want to make people pay for services which are already free.  

and get a digital magazine monthly are just a few things that could be offered.

Which magazine ? WHo's writing it ? 

It's a little silly to say that the Pyra/Pandora could not interest anyone in education considering the population of this planet. Appeal to one magazine like Make or something like ThinkGeek.com with a portable homebrew kit with book and you would sell something. How many you would sell is yet to be determined. I have several friends with Raspberry Pi systems. None of us think they are a good start for game dev. Gameduino is pretty cool. But Pandora/Pyra has everything you need in one portable package. I can't think of any other system that allows you to program and play as well as the Pandora does currently. I even have a Nexus 7 tablet and... even though I can... I don't like programming on it at all. Auto-screen rotate and random shut-offs aside it's just not nice to type on and getting things to work is a hack at best.

If you haven't used Steam yet I suggest you check it out. Part of Valve's incredible success is attributed to it. Allowing you a way to easily manage your software, seeing what games your friends are playing in real time (and being able to jump in their game if it's supported), and creating groups associated with the service separates Valve from the rest easily. IRC and message boards hardly compare. The Pandora already has package management and a system to at least compare high scores of homebrew games with others. If the community were to get together make a managed user-login based system to make game/friend management easier it would revolutionize the scene.

Keeping track of developers, having a section to promote new homebrew education/creation, and promoting contests would be a bonus.

You could even start with a free (ad-based) system and sell a premium subscription (like Playstation network) to cover expenses.

Another bonus would be to get with HumbleBundle.com and support charity.

As far as an e-magazine I was hoping to get you at least a little excited about that Idea. You already provide us with awesome articles. I was hoping to get you excited about a possible revenue source. Underground-Gamer had started an e-magazine before they vanished. It wouldn't be impossible to find people trying to get into game article writing. There are a significant amount of people willing to do things just to buff their resume. It's certainly not as important as linking the community together but it makes things more interesting to have a well-written perspective on things going on in the Pandora/Pyra/HomeBrew scene.

 

[ekianjo]

It's a little silly to say that the Pyra/Pandora could not interest anyone in education considering the population of this planet. Appeal to one magazine like Make or something like ThinkGeek.com with a portable homebrew kit with book and you would sell something.

I'm not saying there is no market for it, but look at the Pandora even currently. How many are using it to teach coding or stuff like that? Of course the entry price is a major barrier, anything marketed above 500 USD is going to have a hard time to sell, and for education there are much cheaper alternatives out there.  

 

[ekianjo]

If you haven't used Steam yet I suggest you check it out. Part of Valve's incredible success is attributed to it. Allowing you a way to easily manage your software, seeing what games your friends are playing in real time (and being able to jump in their game if it's supported), and creating groups associated with the service separates Valve from the rest easily. IRC and message boards hardly compare.

Assuming I don't know Steam ? Are you kidding me ? http://pandoralive.info/?p=2004

You know that Steam took YEARS of development, by a professional company like Valve right ? How do you expect to have something similar in like no time and close to zero Manpower on Pyra, since there are already so much left to do (firmware, OS, etc...). And personally, I think Steam is crap when it comes to connecting with friends - I never use it for that purpose. 

You could even start with a free (ad-based) system and sell a premium subscription (like Playstation network) to cover expenses.

No thank you, I don't (and I know many of people here certainly don't either) want ads in my applications. That's the shitty Android model, and I have no love for that. 

Another bonus would be to get with HumbleBundle.com and support charity.

They don't seem to support lInux much these days. Most of their bundles are now focusing on Windows.  

As far as an e-magazine I was hoping to get you at least a little excited about that Idea. You already provide us with awesome articles. I was hoping to get you excited about a possible revenue source.

I don't do Pandoralive for money. Did you see any ad somewhere on the blog ? Well... there you have it. Its free. It's the beauty of it. Just like GNU/Linux.  

 

[quadcricket]

The Pandora got me interested in game dev again. Maybe the price is high, but I still see it as an avenue worthy of consideration.


I don't expect Dragonbox community software to appear in a day. I just see other successful companies concentrating on that and feel if Dragonbox went in that direction it would benefit them.


I didn't mean ads in game I meant ads in client (optionally). Targeted ads ideally so at least they are of some benefit to the user.

 

[ekianjo]

Targeted ads ideally so at least they are of some benefit to the user.

Targeted ads means invasion of privacy (i.e. they need to collect data on you before they target ads for you). That's why most knowledgeable people use ad blockers, ghostery and cookies killers. I don't think you will get much traction for that idea in this community. 

 

[Natsu]

I don't mind ads from time to time, but as said, target ads are a no-go.

 

[quadcricket]

Targeted ads don't have to be evil. If it is a game client it knows what games you play and can advertise other games you might like that it can offer, free or non-free.


The most important thing, however, is making it easy to download and play games on the device itself. I see there is already another thread considering improvements on the package system. This is very important. Certainly to make it device-native software not requiring more than a few taps to see reviews, read info, and download software.

 

[ekianjo]

I see there is already another thread considering improvements on the package system. This is very important. Certainly to make it device-native software not requiring more than a few taps to see reviews, read info, and download software.

PNDManager is already very much like that on the current Pandora. We don't need to recreate something completely new, we can build on it.  

 

[_jr_]

And Pandoralive and PNDManager (and C4A, and Jedi Knight, and Pyra, and everything else, really) are a very good examples of how things work in Pandoraland: if you want something to happen, start it yourself and expect to mostly do it alone. You can ask for donations and help and may receive some, probably even with a better success rate than in most other communities, but don't expect miracles (like large solutions appearing out of thin air or being able to live from making Pandora software alone). I don't see any reason why this would change with the Pyra.


But that is not exclusively a reason to be sad. It's just the way it is and you can still do whatever yo want. If you think it can successfully be marketed to the education sector, just go ahead. If you want an integrated online platform, start a prototype (perhaps based on PNDManager, it is free after all).


Many thanks to all contributors!