*speculative graph
If current trends in the games industry are to continue, our dubiously-qualified mathematicians have calculated, every company in the world will have a games console out by the end of the 2015/16 fiscal year. The research comes after analysing the last five years of data, which has shown a decided uptake in console manufacture, despite an economic situation best described as “ball-crushing” and a market whose most cohesive direction for the future is “vertically down”.
After both Nvidea and Valve announced or implied that a console was in the works within the space of less than a week, there has been a rash of other manufacturers out to beat them to the post, despite the fact that not even the company-neutral Ouya has been properly released yet. First to the punch were Nvidea’s perennial rivals ATI, who announced a handheld with “guaranteed 50% less flames” than Nvidea’s Shield. Not to be outdone, Intel jumped into the fray, promising graphics performance on their new hybrid console-tablet-smartphone-watch-shoe-dog will provide at least sixty frames of entertainment per minute.
It wasn’t long before MadCatz, seeing a market in this, announced the world’s first “peripheral console” – a plastic stand, which comes with a range of Madcatz branded accessories, such as CPU, case, graphics unit, controllers, screen and games. With less than ten hours since Nvidea’s original announcement, even non-tech companies had jumped into the fray, with McDonalds and Walmart both announcing consoles in the lucrative “food-based” sector, which has recently seen increased investment following the successful launch of Halo 4.
While the announcements continue to come, be sure to look out for the PixelGrater PixelBox, available June 2014 for the low, low price of your dignity. We’d make a Kickstarter joke, but honestly we’ve been doing that a lot lately, and this whole thing shows that it’s the industry as a whole that’s crazy, not just indie devs.
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