Game OS's enter Brand wars.

The great brand wars of our age include: VHS versus betamax, Megadrive versus SNES and HD-DVD versus BluRay. But soon we are going to see a slew of budget "Android" platform devices. These devices are projected to be one of the next steps in gaming, budget range hardware to play mobile platform targeted games; I predict there will be another brand war.

Don't get me wrong I am not condoning these devices, in fact my official standpoint on these Android devices is quite negative. They remind me of the 50-in-1 games "my first console" plastic abortions you could get in Argos. Further to this, it bothers me that the OS is a platform, consoles are a platform, they have traditionally had vast improvements budget-wise over a typical PC due to dedicated architecture, these android devices are just running a gimped version of linux on an underpowered PC.

Despite all this it will more than likely succeed in the casual market all it needs is focused marketing iterating how much "better value" these devices will be. In short these gimpy little boxes will play mobile games, and pretend they are consoles while they do it, they will be the indie "unity fuckabouts" go to access machines. They will be filled with flash clones and micro-payments supported by occasional gems for companies who can easily port their titles. The occasional playable title in found by wading through a fetid sewer system marketplace flooded with throwaway bits of parasitic code.

And these council-consoles will have a brand war they each have their own tweaked android OS and try to outbid/homogenise each other much like a filthy local street market, except the dirty cockney peddlers have taken up real-estate on your TV.

I for one welcome our new legitimate console overlords, PS4 and XBox 720.

Love and Lexibooks,

Richie X