Pandora - Viable Testbed Platform/community For Commerical Dev?

[wraggster]

Prophet posted this over at gp32x forums and id like to see the reactions here to his opinion:

I was just looking over the PowerVR SGX info (http://www.imgtec.com/powervr/produc.../SGX/index.asp) and it occured to me that the Pandora could be a nice testing platform for professional 3D handheld game development. It would have a small, technically inclined community of users - a perfect team of unpaid but enthusiastic testers.

So I wonder - would it be attractive for professional teams to use the Pandora as a testbed? Releasing concept builds of games, and/or even betas and even RC's as they approach final builds for commercial platforms (i.e. PSP, DS, phones etc.)?

Just a thought... I know we have a few such people around here, so I wonder what they think?

I realize the Capcoms and EA's of the world aren't going to do such a thing, but for smaller independent devs and contractors, it might be a fun and useful way to test ideas and code on a small hobbyist community.

Discuss Via Comments

[JKKDARK]

Yes, of course. But they can also do it on the DS or PSP, it's nothing new.
But I would like the idea to see commercial games by these homebrew coders on handhelds, even in the Pandora

[the_eternal_dark]

Hell yeah. Make the players the beta testers.