“I can’t tell you what the price will be, because I literally don’t know,” he said on the November 15 episode of the WAN show.
“When I said I’m disappointed it isn’t going to follow a console pricing model, where its subsided by the fact that manufacturer is going to be taking 30% of every game sold on it over the lifespan of this thing, because I feel that would be a more meaningful product, they asked what I meant by console price and I said $500. Nobody said anything, but the energy in the room wasn’t great.”
It’s a bit of a hard sell in an environment where being economical is the first thing on people’s minds. That’s a very niche audience. People who don’t want to build their own PC, don’t want a normal prebuilt, and are okay being less powerful than a console, and will not to mention not play a ton of multiplayer games out of the box. It’s not going to capture anyone from the console market and its not going to capture the hardcore PC nerds.
What do you mean “people who don’t want a normal prebuilt”? That’s exactly what they’re going to be selling — a normal prebuilt from a vendor people trust with the economy of scale to sell it for a competitive price. It’s got an unusual form factor and some fancy hardware, but functionally that’s what it is.
It runs Linux out of the box not Windows, so it’s not normal. Not to mention it’s barely upgradeable, HDD and RAM only. I know some prebuilts lock you out of upgrading but you can buy plenty that you can fully modify yourself.