Some Pandora Publicity

[dflemstr]

Mention of the Pandora at about 42:02 in this video. Yeah.

I'm not telling you all this because it's interesting or anything, but rather for the reason that it would be good not only to push the Pandora towards consumers, but also towards developers. I'm talking about the kind of developers who don't visit Engadget or similar sites where the Pandora might be mentioned once or twice, but rather the kind of developers who are kinda interested in open source, but haven't been introduced to the small-devices-scene yet or just aren't moving around in the same circles as many of the developers around here are.

It would be cool if we could utilize that pool of developers somehow, currently idling around without something to do, so that we could get more great software for the Pandora.

I suggest therefore that more developer podcast guys (Like Bryan Lunduke in this specific video), more developer-bloggers and so on should be contacted and informed about the Pandora, convincing them that they can gain a lot of readers by mentioning the Pandora and exposing the kind of device that the Pandora is to the general developer masses. It's a win-win situation for the bloggers and us, if we can make this possible.

What say ye, members of this forum?

 

[atomicthumbs]

this link skips to the Pandora mention so you don't have to load everything

 

[jlepley]

I think that the Pandora should be pushed more toward commercial developers along with the open-source developers. There are no licensing fees, no SDKs required, it's easy to develop for, I think we could see a nice slew of low-cost professional games on the Pandora.

 

[Sphinxter]

What attracts commercial development is commercial potential which translates to a large user base which the pandora will not have for at least a few years if ever. We are a niche market and no doubt we will be treated like one. 'You could sell 8k units.', is not even going to put a blip on the screen at EA or Sega.

 

[maxz]

What attracts commercial development is commercial potential which translates to a large user base which the pandora will not have for at least a few years if ever. We are a niche market and no doubt we will be treated like one. 'You could sell 8k units.', is not even going to put a blip on the screen at EA or Sega.

Sell 8k units @ 15$ each, thats pretty damn good money for a indie development team consisting of a few students.

 

[PoisonedV]

What attracts commercial development is commercial potential which translates to a large user base which the pandora will not have for at least a few years if ever. We are a niche market and no doubt we will be treated like one. 'You could sell 8k units.', is not even going to put a blip on the screen at EA or Sega.

Sell 8k units @ 15$ each, thats pretty damn good money for a indie development team consisting of a few students.

Lets take a look
- Your market for the console is assumedly rather cheap since they are buying an open source console for homebrew and emulation primarily in the first place
- Most people won't buy it anyway

So, selling 200 units for 15 dollars each, that's pretty shitty money for the amount of work it would take.

 

[Sphinxter]

What attracts commercial development is commercial potential which translates to a large user base which the pandora will not have for at least a few years if ever. We are a niche market and no doubt we will be treated like one. 'You could sell 8k units.', is not even going to put a blip on the screen at EA or Sega.

Sell 8k units @ 15$ each, thats pretty damn good money for a indie development team consisting of a few students.

Drawing a blank, can't name a commercial program produced by an indie development team consisting of a few students. Perhaps it's the definition of, 'commercial', that's missing here.

 

[El Jefe]

What attracts commercial development is commercial potential which translates to a large user base which the pandora will not have for at least a few years if ever. We are a niche market and no doubt we will be treated like one. 'You could sell 8k units.', is not even going to put a blip on the screen at EA or Sega.

Sell 8k units @ 15$ each, thats pretty damn good money for a indie development team consisting of a few students.

Drawing a blank, can't name a commercial program produced by an indie development team consisting of a few students. Perhaps it's the definition of, 'commercial', that's missing here.

b-b-b-but
WHAT ABOOT BOB'S GAME?

 

[WizardStan]

Drawing a blank, can't name a commercial program produced by an indie development team consisting of a few students. Perhaps it's the definition of, 'commercial', that's missing here.

Perhaps not "students", but World of Goo was produced on $10'000 by two guys.
The linux port took one guy 2 weeks to do.
Assuming a Pandora port could be based off the Linux port and done in at most two weeks, and we let the developer doing the port be paid $1000 a week, they only need to sell 100 units at the current price of $20 to make back their money. Anything beyond that first 100 is pure profit.
The same should hold for any other game that a developer ports. Maybe not two weeks, let's say two months. They still only need to sell 400 at $20 to recoup their expenses, everything after that is pure profit. 400 of 4000 is pretty wishful thinking though, at the moment, but in a year or two it should hopefully expand greatly.
I said it in the commercial games thread and I'll say it again here: if you are expecting commercial devs to give us exclusives, you are living in fantasy land. Any commercial titles we get will be ports of slightly older games, rebuilt on a budget of two man months at most. That is the only way that they will make enough money to make it worthwhile.

 

[Tensuke]

10% of 8,000 users at $15 per game is $12,000. Even 5%($6,000) would be nice. But we really don't need another topic about the commercial potential of paid games.

Also, that was a really interesting video. Thanks for posting, dflemstr!

 

[slygamer]

Sell 8k units @ 15$ each, thats pretty damn good money for a indie development team consisting of a few students.

I'm fairly certain that every person in the first batch is not going to be buying two copies each.

 

[samuraicrow]

It wouldn't be so bad if we could standardize on something desktop-oriented also, like a BeagleBoard or some other board that uses the same chips as the Pandora. The trouble would be that some people would have different screen resolutions and controllers than the Pandora has.

An idea I was hoping for would be to target ARM Linux platforms of all stripes. That way it would run on many MANY netbooks as well as the Pandora. The downside there would be that we still would be limiting our audience if we were closed-source programmers plus the limitations I mentioned above.

Perhaps the best idea would be to target LLVM-based Linux boxes or even LLVM-based compilers with SDL as an installation setup. Then we'd only need custom installer software to call the llc command to translate from bitcode to any Linux, Mac or Windows computer with a particular resolution display. Since LLVM doesn't care whether the destination system is ARM, Intel, AMD, or even PowerPC, we could support larger numbers of people. The only part that would be non-standard would be that we'd have to run OpenGL-ES on systems with full-fledged OpenGL support.

 

[rokdcasbah]

GP32 had some commercial software, GP2X had some too.

http://www.clickgame.../gp2x-store.htm
And W&W, Payback, Vektar, Retrovirus RTS, maybe more. I don't see why Pandora wouldn't, it's even easier to dev for than the GP2X. The lack of OpenGL on the GP2X made it more of a niche device I think.

So anyway I think you're absolutely right dflemstr but it might be wise to wait until people have them in their hands.

A good place to start would be bugging 2d boy about a pandora port of World of Goo

 

[Miner49er]

A good place to start would be bugging 2d boy about a pandora port of World of Goo

Yes, I (and I guess) a lot of people would love to play this polished game on their Pandora.
If only there was some way of convincing 2d boy that enough of us would buy the full version if it were available?

 

[gruso]

We've already badgered the hell out of 2dboy. They even mention Pandora on their contact page. The next logical step would be sending them hardware, if they want it.

 

[juniorm33]

Sell 8k units @ 15$ each, thats pretty damn good money for a indie development team consisting of a few students.

I'm fairly certain that every person in the first batch is not going to be buying two copies each.

That's assuming they stop selling them after the 1st batch.
Personally I think it's all about the ports, more so than worrying about exclusives.
But there's other reasons to develop on Pandora than straight out cash. It's cheap, out of interest, cheap entry into the sort of tech that is becoming prolific(MID.Mobiles etc), kudos! I remember when no one gave any time to linux and mac games, now I'm not saying there massive earners but people still did it.
Anyway, don't want to hijack this thread any more, have to watch it when I get home from work, thanks for posting it!

 

[renegadechic]

i think, at least whilst the userbase for the pandora is low, that i would at the very least like to see a few companies with existing commercial games, especially old retro games, start porting over to the pandora. even if it was just supporting some of the emulators and providing ROMs legally with acknowledgement to use on the pandora. i think that if there is a convenient way to port games easily and make uploading to an "app store" system, mobile developers especially would include it anyway as the games or even the software is already made, and if it is easy to do, it is just another potential revenue stream.

i see this as being similar to mp3 stores. yeah we have itunes and 7digital, etc, however if you are in a band, you will often have it available from many other less popular places too, even if they dont sell as much, it is still a sale and someone somewhere uses it.

 

[Bosbeetle]

It would be very cool if konami would port their old MSX games to the pandora (but they probably won't, they did port them to the wii)

 

[rokdcasbah]

Another port idea: http://www.penumbragame.com/game.php

Those guys deserve your support even if they don't port...such great work for such a small team. I just bought the three episodes and am having a blast with it.

 

[WizardStan]

Another port idea: http://www.penumbragame.com/game.php

Those guys deserve your support even if they don't port...such great work for such a small team. I just bought the three episodes and am having a blast with it.

My game purchasing budget is kept forcefully low, but after playing the demo I just couldn't help myself. Such a high quality game for only $20? How could I resist? Supporting cross platformism is a major plus (bought the Linux version).