Let's Send The Panda Back To The Forest

[-Tj-]

Now consider the Pandora. 4000 units. If they devote a lot fewer employees just to port the very same game, let's take a look at what they'd likely need for maybe 3 months:
1 artist, 2 programmers: $40,000 * 3 = $120,000/4 = $30,000
director: $60,000/4 = $15,000
producer: $70,000/4 = $17,500
office workers: (see above) $40,000/4 = $10,000
Benefits: let's say $2000
Rent & Utilities: $10,000 * 3 months = $30,000

It doesn't actually take that long. Depending on just how many difference there are, it should only take 1 or 2 programmers 2 to 4 weeks. You usually don't need an artist, director, producer, or any of that other stuff, because this is just a sub project of a different project. You might have one director overseeing 12 programmers doing 6 or 8 different porting tasks, or something like that: the cost is still there, but it's pretty negligible. Probably closer to 30'000 for the entire project.

That would be true if it was a straight port, but you'd still need an artist or two to work on UI adjustment, asset improvements/enlargments/reductions, etc. A director and a producer would still be getting paid (even if split between projects), and they'd still be overseeing the project. Don't forget you need to factor in all their other monthly costs, too.

In this case, it'd be PSP to Pandora, which means resizing/rearranging a lot of UI graphics, possibly increasing or re-exporting textures at higher resolutions, etc. If their engine wasn't built to handle shaders the same way, the artist may also have to readjust them to make them look right. While the artist is doing the re-exporting and the UI adjustments, the programmers would be optimizing code and other tasks (providing they don't already have a Linux ARM workflow and tool set built into their pipeline and/or engine).

It may not take 3 months (that was a high estimate), but I think $30,000 is too low. But even if it were $30,000, and they priced their game at $9.99 (highly unlikely if they've invested over $1 mil for the original game), they'd still need to sell it to 75% of the 4000 Pandora owners to break even. Even those odds aren't enough for the big boys to gamble on.

 

[cobaltage]

I don't really envision the Pandora being successful from the commercial standpoint. That's why I pre-ordered one, in fact. I'm looking forward to not seeing Pandora's OS abandoned one year after the device is released. Sorry for the long post, but I've thought about this quite a lot.

Companies that develop commercial gaming systems are interested in closed systems and a unified game development framework. That's precisely what holds back the development of powerful handheld gaming systems. Nintendo is probably the best example of this. The dual-screen design of the NDS makes its games relatively non-portable. The NDSi didn't add a CPU powerful enough for browsing and unnecessarily powerful for NDS games -- instead, it killed the hackable GBA slot (the NDS's biggest vulnerability point), added an SD slot with anti-piracy measures and virtually no features, added a camera which further decreases game portability, and added a closed online game store. This was in conjunction with Nintendo's worldwide legal campaign to abolish hacker carts. The Wii controller was both a novel controller and a relative anti-piracy measure. Compared to Sony, Nintendo is smarter because the pricing structure of Nintendo systems and games is also an anti-piracy measure, and the PS3 is so powerful that it's harder for game developers to master. And most people seem to agree that the latest PSP seems like a bewildering step backwards.

It seems to me that these newest handheld gaming consoles are increasingly not worth hacking. That's part of the intention behind their design.

Whereas there's an explosion of general purpose, ARM Cortex CPU based, PowerVR SGX based handheld systems, with Linux-based OSs and 800x480 landscape-oriented touchscreens. As long as the barriers for developing a single piece of software portable amongst all such systems are relatively low, a community of tens of thousands of rabid Pandora users is not a bad basis for appealing for future software development. The Pandora itself is a useful development platform. It compares very favorably to the Arduino board, Beagle Board, Bug Labs' BUG system, and Marvell's SheevaPlug, to name a few, on the basis of cost and features. It should appeal to the hacker and academic communities, which are possibly the most promising potential sources of software development. Pandora is great as a portable, self-enclosed system, perfect for game developers or projects involving a control system, like robotics or art installations. The ARM Cortex A8 is a good basement level CPU; I don't think there are many tasks worth doing on a 4" screen that it can't do. Likewise, there's not much of an advantage to an even higher res 4" screen than 800x480, etc. The Pandora is right in a technological sweet spot, IMO.

I would rather have a device with hacker/academic cred than commercial cred.

We don't want to cater to hundreds of thousands of dumb consumers, we want to attract the smart, slightly off-kilter crowd who do stuff with stuff. Nokia is actively trying to get in on that action with the N900 and their hack-an-N900 promotion. A great modular synthesizer and drum machine application or VJ control app could make the Pandora's entire cost completely reasonable for certain groups of people. Those are the types of people that should be somehow actively engaged, I think.

 

[Sphinxter]

I agree, brand pollution is a serious threat.

I feel like this is the only on-topic reply of the thread.

And yours was on-topic? OH THE HUMILITY. You Dick.

D.

When the man's right, he's right.