I''m Writing A Letter


I don't want to come off sounding negative... but... if I wanted a handheld that had a lot of commercial backing, and lots of commercial games, I'd buy a mainstream commercial handheld, like the PSP. But instead I want to get a Pandora for the fact it's more of an indie dev platform, a chance to break and do something different. I think it'd be swell if a few slightly more professional teams brought out games for the Pandora (maybe startup companies with a few people working there), but having massive multi-million dollar studios creating games for the Pandora just seems a bit odd to me, it just isn't a good match at all.

For an extreme example it's like saying, "I really want a waffle iron, can someone bring out a waffle iron for the Pandora?" so the answer is "Um, if you want a waffle iron, buy a waffle iron. If you want a Pandora, buy a Pandora.".

I wouldn't mind some waffles now actually...

Steve
 
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A lot of negativity in this thread. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate how likely it is that his letter will end up in the bin, but if he wants to do it there's no harm in trying. I can't see how he would embarrass himself by doing this.
 
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This is sooooo cute Ninja. Sounds like a 14 yo boy sending a letter to his favorite band to ask them if they'd like to come and play in his living-room.
Considering the pandora would be a market for commercial games is very naive. There's absolutely no money to be made on this platform. It's open source, ran by nerds, used by nerds who, if there was a commercial game released, would instantly make it a torrent.
cute though. cute.
 
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'ttcircus' said:
This is sooooo cute Ninja. Sounds like a 14 yo boy sending a letter to his favorite band to ask them if they'd like to come and play in his living-room.
Considering the pandora would be a market for commercial games is very naive. There's absolutely no money to be made on this platform. It's open source, ran by nerds, used by nerds who, if there was a commercial game released, would instantly make it a torrent.
cute though. cute.
Not a big fan of Bungie games, but I hope Ninja gets a positive response just so I get to see you all eat your respective hats :p
 
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'coolbeans' said:
'ttcircus' said:
This is sooooo cute Ninja. Sounds like a 14 yo boy sending a letter to his favorite band to ask them if they'd like to come and play in his living-room.
Considering the pandora would be a market for commercial games is very naive. There's absolutely no money to be made on this platform. It's open source, ran by nerds, used by nerds who, if there was a commercial game released, would instantly make it a torrent.
cute though. cute.
Not a big fan of Bungie games, but I hope Ninja gets a positive response just so I get to see you all eat your respective hats :p



I hope too ;)
 
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Don't write a letter, if you want to contact them, do so through the forum. But a positive response might only come from single bungie workers and not from the company itself.
 
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'coolbeans' said:
'ttcircus' said:
This is sooooo cute Ninja. Sounds like a 14 yo boy sending a letter to his favorite band to ask them if they'd like to come and play in his living-room.
Considering the pandora would be a market for commercial games is very naive. There's absolutely no money to be made on this platform. It's open source, ran by nerds, used by nerds who, if there was a commercial game released, would instantly make it a torrent.
cute though. cute.
Not a big fan of Bungie games, but I hope Ninja gets a positive response just so I get to see you all eat your respective hats :p


+1. Bungie already released the source of Marathon so they might be interested of a port for the Pandora. Let's specify: the idea of posting something on the forums is better then e-mailing them, because *one* of their team *might* be interested, so give it a try, you've got nothing to lose.

PS: [rant] And I say **** yourself I don't think so many people would make torrents out of commercial games for Pandora since a "pandora nerd" knows how much difficult it is to get a decent game for this platform. The dumb***** that download torrents of everything will _NEVER_ be interested in the Pandora project, but in other handhelds with plenty of games. [/rant]

PPS: Sorry for the rant :p
 
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'kattle87' said:
'coolbeans' said:
'ttcircus' said:
This is sooooo cute Ninja. Sounds like a 14 yo boy sending a letter to his favorite band to ask them if they'd like to come and play in his living-room.
Considering the pandora would be a market for commercial games is very naive. There's absolutely no money to be made on this platform. It's open source, ran by nerds, used by nerds who, if there was a commercial game released, would instantly make it a torrent.
cute though. cute.
Not a big fan of Bungie games, but I hope Ninja gets a positive response just so I get to see you all eat your respective hats :p


+1. Bungie already released the source of Marathon so they might be interested of a port for the Pandora. Let's specify: the idea of posting something on the forums is better then e-mailing them, because *one* of their team *might* be interested, so give it a try, you've got nothing to lose.

PS: [rant] And I say **** yourself I don't think so many people would make torrents out of commercial games for Pandora since a "pandora nerd" knows how much difficult it is to get a decent game for this platform. The dumb***** that download torrents of everything will _NEVER_ be interested in the Pandora project, but in other handhelds with plenty of games. [/rant]

PPS: Sorry for the rant :p



oi, stay polite mister. You guys really believe there are gonna be ANY commercial games released on the pandora? Open your eyes!
 
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'ttcircus' said:
Considering the pandora would be a market for commercial games is very naive. There's absolutely no money to be made on this platform. It's open source, ran by nerds, used by nerds who, if there was a commercial game released, would instantly make it a torrent.
Of course it will be a market for commercial games. Just not Halo. There will be a lot of awesome commercial indie games, though. If you pirate those, I'll come by your house personally and kick you in the arse. Except, of course, if you really can't afford paying for them. Which is somewhat unlikely if you can afford getting a Pandora.

Bungie have made Marathon open source, so we'll just have to port that ourselves. Getting anything else from them is unlikely so I prefer to waste my time writing emails to people who might actually be interested in porting games to the Pandora.
 
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It could be a while before there are even more than 10,000 people with a Pandora, and 50,000 is a realistic upper range figure for a few years. If you sell a game for $40 (which is pretty high for a handheld game on a niche platform, especially if it were to be a port) and it sells to half of all Pandora users after it has been a few years (very ambitious, especially considering how many users are not buying this to really play games at all) then you will gross $1m. Depending on how it is sold there would not necessarily be a lot of overhead there so if it is a pretty small job that just takes a few people a couple months to work through then it could be worth it.

But in actuality you would probably struggle to gross even a tenth of that. From what I am aware of, Payback for GP2X sold in the hundreds. And I do not think that was hurt by people pirating it, just no one really cared. A port of a popular game by a popular company could be different, I guess.

Although this was forever ago, iD ported Doom to all sorts of pretty low success consoles like 32X, Jaguar, and 3DO (although each probably still sold more units than Pandora will). Maybe they wouldd port Doom 3 to Pandora if you got them interested enough? Carmack has expressed interest in iPhone, maybe he would like Pandora for similar reasons (but iPhone is much more ubiquitous)

EDIT: Contractions -_-
 
It's more probable that they hand us the source, say "do it yourself" and sell us the data files. Of course, that would be a perfectly fine solution. :)
 
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mmm, tell you what, 50000 seems a lot. The main reason being the pandora in its actual state wont last more than 2 years. 20000 seems more realistic although it really depends on how good the first batch is. you'll have max 1000 buying a game. max. A game on this platform would be $15 max. You do the maths. Minus the time spent on it = not worth it. You'll play old games on emulators that's it. Wake up guys, I think a lot of pando-fan are having way too high expectations re the commercial success. My 2 cents.
Now, please, some bashing.
 
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'Rockthesmurf' said:
I don't want to come off sounding negative... but... if I wanted a handheld that had a lot of commercial backing, and lots of commercial games, I'd buy a mainstream commercial handheld, like the PSP. But instead I want to get a Pandora for the fact it's more of an indie dev platform, a chance to break and do something different. I think it'd be swell if a few slightly more professional teams brought out games for the Pandora (maybe startup companies with a few people working there), but having massive multi-million dollar studios creating games for the Pandora just seems a bit odd to me, it just isn't a good match at all.

For an extreme example it's like saying, "I really want a waffle iron, can someone bring out a waffle iron for the Pandora?" so the answer is "Um, if you want a waffle iron, buy a waffle iron. If you want a Pandora, buy a Pandora.".

I wouldn't mind some waffles now actually...
I like waffles so I bought a waffle iron. I bought some Eggo waffles, but the holes don't line up. Turns out you need a toaster for making Eggo waffles; a waffle iron is for making them from scratch. So I contacted Eggo about changing their waffle making process so their waffles will fit in my waffle iron! I'm sure they'll say yes because it makes perfect sense to me and I can't believe no one has thought of it before!
:D
[/sarcastic-jerk]
 
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'ttcircus' said:
mmm, tell you what, 50000 seems a lot. The main reason being the pandora in its actual state wont last more than 2 years. 20000 seems more realistic although it really depends on how good the first batch is. you'll have max 1000 buying a game. max. A game on this platform would be $15 max. You do the maths. Minus the time spent on it = not worth it. You'll play old games on emulators that's it. Wake up guys, I think a lot of pando-fan are having way too high expectations re the commercial success. My 2 cents.
Now, please, some bashing.
It can go both ways, really. Depends a lot on the first batch quality. The somewhat broken, somewhat boring GP2X sold 50.000 units as far as I know so selling that much should only be a matter of getting the production stabilized. Beyond that, it mostly depends on if the team can deliver on their promises and I'm cautiously optimistic in that regard. We already got pretty good hype. If the Pandora does what it promises and does it stably, it might well sell some hundred thousands. It's a very unique and future proof device. It should last for about 4 years easily and even then still be a pretty good pocket computer.
Fuck emulators, there will be a lot of quality free and commercial indie games on this device. That's not wishful thinking but a solid prediction.
 
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'Exophase' said:
It could be a while before there are even more than 10,000 people with a Pandora, and 50,000 is a realistic upper range figure for a few years. If you sell a game for $40 (which is pretty high for a handheld game on a niche platform, especially if it were to be a port) and it sells to half of all Pandora users after it has been a few years (very ambitious, especially considering how many users are not buying this to really play games at all) then you will gross $1m. Depending on how it is sold there would not necessarily be a lot of overhead there so if it is a pretty small job that just takes a few people a couple months to work through then it could be worth it.

But in actuality you would probably struggle to gross even a tenth of that. From what I am aware of, Payback for GP2X sold in the hundreds. And I do not think that was hurt by people pirating it, just no one really cared. A port of a popular game by a popular company could be different, I guess.
Is there any particular reason why someone would develop exclusively for Pandora and not make sure their game could work on Linux, Windows and Mac as well? Wouldn't that make the figures more favourable?
 
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That is exactly what is happening: We are already getting quite a few cross platform games because it's really not that much effort to make them run on the Pandora as well. It might seem like those games wouldn't be that special because they are not exclusive. Until you realize that the Pandora is the only handheld with the proper controls and the power to make them fun to play.
 
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'ttcircus' said:
mmm, tell you what, 50000 seems a lot. The main reason being the pandora in its actual state wont last more than 2 years. 20000 seems more realistic although it really depends on how good the first batch is. you'll have max 1000 buying a game. max. A game on this platform would be $15 max. You do the maths. Minus the time spent on it = not worth it. You'll play old games on emulators that's it. Wake up guys, I think a lot of pando-fan are having way too high expectations re the commercial success. My 2 cents.
Now, please, some bashing.
I was giving upper limits, but those are pretty pessimistic numbers.

2 years: why are you killing it so soon? GP2X was killed in two years, but a lot of people feel it was done prematurely. It was also hardware that wasn't that much better than GP32 (and Wiz isn't that much better than GP2X..) that was a little behind the curve as soon as it was released. I'm sure Pandora can last 3-4 years at least before no one wants to buy it anymore.

20,000 units (or 10,000 a year in your metric) The demand for the first batch was pretty huge (way beyond what they actually took orders for) and that's for something that's not out going purely on hype. If it makes good initial impressions then it could go well beyond this. GP2X sold over 20,000 despite GPH doing all kinds of things wrong, not marketing it heavily, coming from South Korea, being sold through resellers only, etc, and lasting two years. Pandora is reaching far beyond GP2X's user base so doesn't it seem like it could do better than it in the same amount of time? Compare how Wiz preorders are selling vs how quickly Pandora's sold out. Of course, all of this depends on resources to actually make and sell these.

1,000 buyers (or 5% of Pandora owners in your metric): Depends on how good the game is really. If it's competitive with top games on say, PSP (or at least iPhone) then it'll probably sell a number of Pandoras by itself. The most popular games on consoles have much better than 5% sell rates (looking at the numbers) and here people won't be balancing budget against a lot of other things sold for the platform.

$15: Why? If it's a port of a game that sold for $50+ especially.
 
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