It's been real tough finding any decent information on this new console at all!

The best article I've found is here at CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/08/27/hln.game.phantom/index.html


I think this could be the beginning of a real console market for indies. Also, with that low monthly fee, they've already got their hands on your credit card, so it's easy to have a micropayment system and bill you at the end of the month.

I've already got an x-box and several PCs, but if it had tivo-like capabilities, I'd buy it right away.


Still- the company's marketing looks really amateur to me. It could be a hoax or a company about to make a huge flop.


I wonder if they've considered putting a word processor on the thing - it could be a cheap computer replacement.

I have a friend at Infinium. He's very confident in the Phantom. The main thing that makes me think the Phantom will hit trouble is that they havn't addressed the bad publicity quickly enough and it's just growing.

To have a successfull console is a completely differant fish to having a Good Console. A 3GHz processor with the lastest Whizbang nVidia graphics makes for quite a nice box, but people won't buy it if they think it will flop and won't be around in a year. Stores won't carry it for the same reason. More importantly game makers might not develop for it.

I hope it's going to be a success. It's hard to tell but they've made it an uphill battle selling the idea.

Interesting idea, but the console market is tough to get into.

Why not take the same idea and set it up as a PC-based service? Valve tried to do something like that (http://www.steampowered.com/). It doesn't seem to have taken off though.

Originally posted by Siebharinn
Valve tried to do something like that (http://www.steampowered.com/). It doesn't seem to have taken off though. This is one of the interesting things about selling a new idea. Only a few years ago there were huge numbers of people who said the basic concept of PDAs wouldn't fly. They all thought that the Newton was conclusive proof that there was no money to be had in that field. It wan't until the palm popped up that everybody went PDA crazy. The same might be true for a service like this.

It goes to show how easy it is to fail with a winning idea if you get your implementation out by just a little. It also goes to show how many people consider the viability of a field by how well others have done in it and not by how well could be done in it.

The opportunity for a pc-based service has been there for a long time. We've got real.com.

But there is something different about a console. A console is just another an appliance you use. A computer is a machine you configure, tune, maintain... and calculate your finances on. Console games give you that strapped-in feeling. PC games send me looking for patches, mods, maybe even cheats.

I think there is a pretty good chance people will buy this $300 device because not only can the kids play their games on it, but you can also browse the web from the comfort of your living room. You can always get new content for it easily, without the trip to Blockbuster. And people will get the new content, which is good for us, because they're paying 10 dollars a month.

The truth is that online PC content won't be able to give us everything we want until Palladium is standard, and no one wants Palladium, so forget it.


It's better than the Atari and TI 99/4a computer I had hooked to my TV when I was a kid.

In another 10 years, new indie developers can talk about how they loved making games for their Phantom (and it's immitators) instead of their Commedore 64s.


With any luck it wil force Microsoft to take a more open approach to XBox 2.

The Phantom was often regarded as a hoax, and I think it even won some vaporware awards (category ruled by Duke Nukem Forever). It was mostly because they claimed the console would have around 50K titles by launch time, which sounded ridiculous - unless it's 50K already existing PC titles, and the console is actually a content delivery system for PC titles, which it seems to be.