Taking Gaming To the Next Billion Players

[wraggster]

June marks the launch across Brazil of Zeebo, a console that aims to tap an enormous new market for videogaming for the billion-strong, emerging middle classes of such countries as Brazil, India, Mexico, Russia and China. Zeebo uses the same Qualcomm chipsets contained in high-end smartphones, together with 1GB of flash memory, three USB slots and a proprietary dual analogue gamepad. It plugs into a TV and outputs at a 640 x 480 pixel resolution. 'The key thing is we're using off-the-shelf components,' says Mike Yuen, director of the gaming group at Qualcomm. This approach means that, while Zeebo can be priced appropriately for its markets — it will launch at US $199 in Brazil compared to around US $250 (plus another US $50 for a mod chip to play pirated games) for a PlayStation 2 in the region — and next year the company plans to drop the price of the console to $149. But the most important part of the Zeebo ecosystem is its wireless digital distribution that gets around the low penetration of wired broadband in many of these countries, negates the cost of dealing with packaged retail goods, and removes the risk of piracy, with the games priced at about $10 locked to the consoles they're downloaded to. Zeebo is not meant to directly compete with powerful devices like Sony's PlayStation 3, Microsoft's Xbox 360, or the Wii. 'In Latin America, where there's a strong gaming culture, that's what we'll be, but in India and China we can be more educational or lifestyle-oriented,' says Yuen. One Indian gaming blog predicts Zeebo will struggle, in part due to the cultural reluctance toward digital distribution and also the lack of piratable games.

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl.../04/26/1555226

[mike_jmg]

Too pricy for a piece of crap that has ps1 kind of graphics



my veredict: major failure, keep trying

[osgeld]

yea, its expensive for doom and crash cart racing

its also made of off the shelf components so any yahoo that wants to can clone it, so theres no future in hardware sales

the download only distribution is dumb in places where there is very little broadband (but yet apparently has plenty of money for celphone internet) and makes piracy so much easier, for the above reasons

dumb dumb dumb

[apex05]

How many times have we seen these dumb idealistic people who think they found a gap in the market? They'll just end up with a warehouse full of unsold consoles and a company in recievership, China's already making a load of homebrew consoles, and i think a more powerfull home version of the Dingoo has a better chance to succeed.

[jamotto]

On par to a PS2 but cheaper with a digital distribution that uses 3G in a place that has better cell phone sales than the US and better coverage to boot. Seems like a good gamble to me.

[Darksaviour69]

interesting idea. Lets see how well it is executed.

The graphics seems to a little sub power dreamcast. It will be interesting to see is crash and quake is the best it can do.

Btw its Quake not Doom in the video