MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - 'Will ship next year' and 'Indiegogo'... Yeah. About that.

> Source :
> https://www.kotaku.com.au/2017/09/ataribox-will-ship-next-year-costs-us249-to-us299/

From the article:

"We're launching Ataribox on Indiegogo this autumn (read: pretty soon). To reiterate why: we want you, the Atari community, to be part of this launch. We want you to have early access, grab special editions (& pricing) and to have you as active partners in the rollout of Ataribox. We want you to be part of the story."

What a cynical load of marketing horseshit.

If I'm reading this correctly, the genii behind the Ataribox are asking their customers to fund their company under the guise of allowing those customers to "be part of the story". That's pretty fucking patronising, but the worst part is that there are people out there who will fall for their line.

Let Ataribox shoulder 100% of the risk, get the product to market, and see it fail or succeed on their dime. Don't ask your customers to take a large chunk of that risk for you, then charge them for the privilege of acquiring one of your devices.

Speaking of the device: so it's a Linux box. Hoo-bloody-ray. So is practically everything else these days, and I'm hoping that they're building an end-to-end infrastructure that will allow it to remain secured enough that it doesn't turn into yet another Internet of Shit device, albeit one that could conceivably leak personal and financial information. My money's on 'they'll probably get around to it after the massively-embarassing security incident happens, assuming the company survives'.

The odd thing is that I would like to see the Ataribox be a success, offering something that other gaming platforms don't. But the funding model does not give me the warm fuzzies that Ataribox, Inc. (or whatever it is that the company behind it is called) has its act together, and the choice of OS isn't a selling point for 99.999% of the population. Oh, and all that media playback functionality is now available natively on even a $135 TV or $58 Blu-Ray player already on the shelf at Wal-Mart, so the extra cost of the gaming platform really needs to justify itself to a potential purchaser - and now that we've had over 9000 Flashback consoles on the market, tons of DLC methods of playing old games, and 20+ years of FOSS arcade emulation around, those new titles they're planning for the system really need to be utterly stellar. Games sell consoles, period.

But, hey. Fake woodgrain. So it's got that going for it.