Nvidia has been making ripples in the gaming industry. The chip-maker has been pursuing a game console of its own under the ‘Shield’ branding. Shield is essentially a mix of tablet and a game console, making it a unique offering in the gaming arena. Nvidia has now announced the pricing and launch details of the console.
Currently, the European Space Agency (ESA) is in the process of developing autonomous spaceships. However, the agency requires huge amount of data for simulation purposes, so that it can later tweak the artificial intelligence accordingly. For this purpose, it is collaborating with Parrot AR.Drone creators to launch an app and crowdsource data from users.
Online ads can be annoying, that’s very true. But it must be understood that for most websites, they are critically important. Without ads, technology websites such as ours would go bankrupt in no time. But Destructoid users seems to sideline the fact. The site has announced that half of its readers have started using ad-blockers and it is appealing them to give up that habit.
Ouya was one of the most wildly successful KickStarter campaigns during the year 2012. The Android game console was able to amass a whopping $8.5 million on KickStarter and developers have received the game console by December, 2012. The company has now announced that KickStarter backers of the console will finally have their units by March this year, before retail launch in June.
Ever since Apple became the undisputed king of the mobile market with its iPhone and iPad offerings, the company has steadily gained share in the gaming arena. That is because users are increasingly using mobile devices to play their games. So it is not surprising when Valve’s co-founder, Gabe Newell, says that the biggest threat to the console market itself is Apple.
The gaming industry has undergone a rather radical change in recent years. Mobile gaming and social gaming has gained major portion of the market whereas the sales of regular consoles and standard video game discs have declined. In 2012 alone, the sales of video game discs and consoles fell by 22%.
Nvidia has long been working hard on pouring all the best of its experiences into a single product that would blow off the gamers. This year, the company has apparently concluded the hard work and decided to unveil the highly ambitious ‘Project Shield’ at CES 2013.
With the success of Ouya, many had speculated that the funds crowdsourcing model may finally be ripe to disrupt the mainstream gaming industry. Ouya certainly has been a wild success and right on its heels, PlayJam has now launched GameStick, being touted as the tiniest and most portable TV games console.