Actually, no. Marketing this as a game console at this moment makes no sense. Because there are no games.
No game console maker has ever made real money on the hardware. If Google is just breaking even on the Nexus Tablet, even when it's sold from their own webstore, they can't be making much on this more powerful hardware.
The Google Play media sales, including games, is where the money is.
Without marketing as a game console, games will be available soon enough. Here's the plan:
1) Existing Android game developers will adapt their games to work with the Nexus Q. Because it is EASY.
2) Friends will have fun at parties queuing up music and videos and playing games. Games that can (for the moment) only be played on the Nexus Q. Some of said friends will buy the Nexus Q. Google hopes it spreads virally.
3) Google cleans up selling the media. If you have a Nexus Q and Android phone, you are going go to Google Play first to buy all your media.
I'm not saying it's a genius business plan. But it's the only business case I've seen that makes sense of this strange device.
It only takes a small percentage of people weaned away from the existing Steam/Amazon/iTunes ecosystems and over to the nascent Google Play to make this a very profitable venture.
I only realized just how powerful iTunes is when I tried to convince my girlfriend over to switch to Linux many moons ago. I failed. Because she is wedded to Apple for life. All her content works seamlessly with Apple products. The price to move away from Apple has simply become too great, for her and countless other Apple users. You simply cannot compete for those users anymore. The big boys need to lockdown the remaining users to survive. And fast.
Is this actually more powerful hardware than the Nexus 7? I don't get the impression that the CPU is faster. And it while it does have an amp, it does not have a 7" IPS display with a capacitive touchscreen. If anything, I would expect the Nexus Q to be cheaper to build if they were built in the same quantities.
No game console maker has ever made real money on the hardware. If Google is just breaking even on the Nexus Tablet, even when it's sold from their own webstore, they can't be making much on this more powerful hardware.
The Google Play media sales, including games, is where the money is.
Without marketing as a game console, games will be available soon enough. Here's the plan:
1) Existing Android game developers will adapt their games to work with the Nexus Q. Because it is EASY.
2) Friends will have fun at parties queuing up music and videos and playing games. Games that can (for the moment) only be played on the Nexus Q. Some of said friends will buy the Nexus Q. Google hopes it spreads virally.
3) Google cleans up selling the media. If you have a Nexus Q and Android phone, you are going go to Google Play first to buy all your media.
I'm not saying it's a genius business plan. But it's the only business case I've seen that makes sense of this strange device.
It only takes a small percentage of people weaned away from the existing Steam/Amazon/iTunes ecosystems and over to the nascent Google Play to make this a very profitable venture.
I only realized just how powerful iTunes is when I tried to convince my girlfriend over to switch to Linux many moons ago. I failed. Because she is wedded to Apple for life. All her content works seamlessly with Apple products. The price to move away from Apple has simply become too great, for her and countless other Apple users. You simply cannot compete for those users anymore. The big boys need to lockdown the remaining users to survive. And fast.