OK, this was definitely the Huh-moment of the week. I just read an article on Betanews about an interview with Acer’s senior vice president James T. Wong, where he announced some obscure PC-based gaming machine (I guess he means a console ;-)). The big selling point compared to established players in the market like Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony some obscure “open standards” are mentioned.
Some details would have been really nice esp. considering that they want to be the open guys here. So let’s speculate a little bit here. While I’m definitely for open standards and up to some degree also for standards when it comes to gaming consoles (esp. in regards to API, SDKs etc. which could help most of all small and indie developers) I’m not really sure, if Acer is the right company to try something like this.
First of all: Acer has no record what so ever to have at least something to do with gaming. While this was also the primary argument against Sony when they wanted to enter the video games market back before the very first Playstation, Sony was at least huge in multimedia and entertainment in general, all I know from Acer are displays and notebooks (and they don’t have a good track-record in at least the first department with me here ;-)).
Then, most of the time, the big selling point for any console during the first year or longer are the first-party titles. With Acer, they’d probably have to rely from the get-go more or less exclusively on 3rd party titles. Smells like 3DO or N-Gage to me and we all know, how well these two worked out.
So, in the end, I’m curious to learn more about this esp. since there is nothing there yet apart from those obscure “open standards”. Perhaps someone also mistook the date from April 1st, who knows.
Update: I guess even for Acer, the “Huh?!” was a too big one ;-) So it’s nothing more than a PC.
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