by Anton Shilov
10/30/2004 | 03:47 AM
Infinium Labs and Sun Microsystems have announced plans to create a network and infrastructure to stream content for Infinium’s Phantom Game Service, direct to the living room.
<%BANNER[article]%>“The Game Technologies Group’s understanding of online gaming, along with the broad-based expertise of the company in delivering content and services over networks, makes Sun an ideal partner for us. Sun’s expertise in delivering content from back-end systems to the user will now become one of our biggest assets. We can focus on offering consumers choice, convenience and ease of use with our PC and Java-based game service,” said Kevin Bachus, president, Infinium Labs.
Sun to Stream Games for Phantom
Infinium Labs chose to work with Sun’s Game Technologies Group after evaluating the offerings of several undisclosed providers in the space, the company said. Infinium Labs and Sun plan to deploy joint marketing programs that underscore their shared vision for the video game industry.
Sun is providing architecture design and back-end infrastructure as part of the overall solution. Sun’s Java technology has been adopted by carriers, handset manufacturers and content companies that want to create and deploy advanced applications and innovative mobile data services. Java technology now powers more than 1.75 billion devices around the globe, including 579 million Java Powered phones, 600 million Java Card technology-enabled smart cards, set-top boxes, PDAs, printers, games and web-sites. Java technology and the online consumer marketplace Java.com let consumers enjoy games and puzzles, sports, chats, email, the arts, financial tools and much more.
Infinium Labs plans to launch its Phantom Game Service in 2005.
Earlier this year, Infinium announced its support of the Java 2 Standard Edition Runtime Environment and Sun’s game APIs, which will allow Java technology-based games to run on the Phantom service out of the box. The Phantom game service also supports PC games.
Infinium Labs plans to launch its Phantom Game Service in 2005.
PC Console for Everyone
The Phantom Gaming Service has four key components: the service itself, the receiver hardware, a robust and flexible distribution network and a large library of games. Titles will be streamed on demand from the service to a Phantom receiver over any broadband Internet connection, in much the same way as consumers receive on-demand satellite or cable television content. Subscribers will receive an initial library of free games, which will be supplemented with new choices each month as a part of their subscription fee. Additional titles can be rented or purchased. Premium content packages will also be made available.
The Phantom gaming console will be based on AMD Athlon XP 2500+ central processing unit with NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400 core-logic. The NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra graphics processing unit will serve as the graphics base for the console. The Phantom will be equipped with 256MB of DDR SDRAM memory as well as 40GB hard disk drive. In addition, the part will come bundled with a gamepad, a mouse and the Phantom Lapboard, an innovative peripheral that enables players to control games designed for keyboard and mouse usage as intuitively and with as much fidelity on the couch as they are used to in the office, the company said.
The Phantom console will be produced in
There is no information whether the Phantom is a Linux-based console, or a Windows-based console.
The Phantom will be available for $199 initially.
Prospects Unclear?
Historically there were a number of consoles based on technologies for personal computers. Virtually all of them did not appear to be a success. A company called Indrema rolled-out a project of L600 console featuring PC hardware and Linux operating system in 2000, but failed to bring it into the market because of insufficient funding. The most successful PC-based console ever is popular Xbox from Microsoft Corporation. Even though Microsoft now manages to sell its product at an affordable price, the company looses quite some money on every such machine and aims to perform a tangible shift in its strategy with the Xbox 2.
Prospects of consoles designed to play PC games are quite shady these days, as there are barebone PC manufacturers who offer small form-factor fully-functional computers with design to fit into living rooms. While now such devices come from manufacturers themselves and require skills to install components like CPUs and HDDs, eventually some system integrators may start to sell already working computers based on similar barebones. Given that those PCs are more powerful and can run games faster, there is a very limited list of advantages consoles may have over PCs.
However, Phantom is not only a console, but a service that will be available for some $30 per month, allowing to download and play an array of games without leaving the living room. The games Infinium promises to bring include the most-innovative cutting-edge titles as well as old-school PC games. Will the approach work? This remains to be seen.