SNESFAN
Retro game fanatic
they had that superbowl ad, and there was lots and lots of buzz about it on the net, I felt their actual marketing was pretty good on getting the word out there. My sister who is more of a "mainstream gamer" and not a techie, even asked me my opinions on it without me telling her about it beforehand.
But here was the nail in the coffin on the play I think (my theory at least) Their game support was just absolutely horrid. None of sony's first party titles ever came over like they said they were going to. Then they scrapped ericson (possibly due to poor xperia play sales) Their sony ps1 titles on android where splintered every which way depending on country (europe got the majority of the good ones), and the first party game selection was just god aweful as well. They never finished support for the PSN which would have been a mind blowingly killer feature. I can go on and on about their lack of support in areas they could have literally revolutionized the market.
OS wise they did a bad job there as well. Gingerbread ran awesome, and with love their ICS build was really decent as well if they would have ever finished it. They officially said the hardware couldn't be supported even though they themselves proved it could, but they had already given up hope on their own product at that point and started pushing newer spec'd devices out the door and left that one to die.
I've looked into it a bunch and the PC streaming is not the walled garden as it's maybe being presenting it to be. Saw an interview with someone who actually knows what he's talking about. Games like warcraft and old PC titles (not steam) are useable if you configure the game yourself and have the correct input on the device (720p + bluetooth keyboard/mouse + shield) They do have to be manually "hooked" into the geforce experience app via a script or whatever though. So no fear there, the beta tag and official support is really only for the seamless compatibility with steam from what I'm gathering.
If the sheild crashes and burns that will definitely be the saving grace from all this, standardization. It doesn't really help the fact that similar sized projects may not happen agian for a while afterwords, But if they do, they will at least have app support hopefully.
So far NVIDIA is doing everything right in my opinion from a non splintered market perspective. They are even reversing their previous stance on locking down tegra enhanced games to tegra hardware. They have and are encouring a use of an API system for their device IDs. Games should be universally compatible for the most part but will have flags in the apps that turn on graphic qualities depending on the chipset you have. Dead Trigger 2 will be available on qualcom, TI, and samsung chipsets with different levels of graphics turned on/off depending on settings and capabilities. They can't speak for their competitors, but it sounds like a good system to build for instead of haveing to build and maintain 10 different versions of the same game if you are using device specific code.
I've read they are further fixing the adoption/splintering of hardware controller problem with their own line of "made for tegra" controller branding that are sold to hardware OEM's controllers all share the same keycodes. I don't know how that's going to effect the current gen of controllers (moga, icp etc etc) but it looks like the branding might be the "thing to have" in the future.
Something that might help the industry a bit for higher quality games, and app developers supporting multiple platforms outside the shield. Nvidia is licensing out their Tegra+geforce chipset like ARM does with their CPU. Kinda cool thing to think about if android gaming gets recognized with tegra in general. Even if nvidia isn't directly making the chips, future gaming devices can take advantage of that license and make their own hardware in house. App developers can optimize for that one type of chipset and hit a wide variety of hardware. (I'm not an app developer, but I have heard that is starting to become a problem more than it was in the past)
Last edited by a moderator:
