Slightly Mad Studios, the London-based studio behind Project CARS, apparently wants to be a direct competitor in the home console market. After teasing about the Mad Box on Twitter, the company's founder and CEO, Ian Bell, gave more information about this upcoming console, touting it as "the most powerful console ever built".

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In an exclusive interview with Variety, Bell further detailed that “it will support most major VR headsets and those upcoming and the specs will be equivalent to a ‘very fast PC 2 years from now’. We’re in early talks with manufacturers of components so we can’t say much more right now other than we have the designs specced out in detail.”

“We plan to allow games from all developers, old and new. The ’new’ possibly being many of those that benefit from our completely free development engine,” Bell said. “It will be a stand alone console.”

“We think the industry is a little too much of a monopoly or a micro oligopoly,” he further added. “We think competition is healthy and we have the required hardware contacts to be able to bring something epic to fruition based on our designs.”

According to the Variety interview, Slightly Mad Studios will release images of early design builds in four to six weeks time and the console will ship in around three years time.

So what do you think? Is there a space for a fourth competitor in the home console market? Will you consider getting the Mad Box? Or will you wait for what Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have in store for their next console before deciding?

SOURCE

 

[Deleted User]

Sega did back in the past and we saw how badly that went

Oh I know that. I more should have added that even they'd have a hard time getting BACK into the console industry.

 

[KingVamp]

Home consoles all the time. Honestly, I rather see more companies in the portable market. The closest thing to that are so call gaming phones.

 

[FAST6191]

Sega did back in the past and we saw how badly that went

Several beloved consoles (other than the SG1000 which is more just not well known they are all adored to this day*) and arguably leaders in certain notable territories, several beloved franchises, first to showcase several ground breaking technologies and styles of gameplay, shaped the relationship between developers and makers for decades to come (while Sony did the "we actually like our devs" dance with the PS1 and stopped Nintendo dead in its tracks Sega was doing well with the same routine in the years prior), decades as a prominent force in the gaming industry where otherwise a single decade typically makes you a notable player and two makes you a legend.

*the nomad being a portable megadrive means I count it as a version of that.

Truly a fate worse than death.

 

[Nerdtendo]

this is gonna disappear

 

[Vorde]

Home consoles all the time. Honestly, I rather see more companies in the portable market. The closest thing to that are so call gaming phones.

Since Sony screwed off with support for the VITA so early, it's a real shame to see only Nintendo dominating the portable market. I'm really surprised Microsoft hasn't stepped in with something, but no one has, so it's just 3DS and Switch at this point.

 

[AT-LOWDeSu]

While i agree with you 100%...when it comes to some companies...its just a flat out "NO!"

Google created the custom Chrome OS and we saw how badly that went. Like omfg could Google create an any worse OS? Some companies just aren't meant to create custom OSs.

What's wrong with Chrome OS? It runs anything that's built for the Android platform so it has tons of content right out of the gate. It works with almost all windows accessories-- printers, keyboards, hard drives, ect. All kinds of I/O devices are supported. It's a got a clean and simple UI that quite simply 'works'. It uses a very small amount of processing-- have you compared the processors on a chromebook to that of a macbook or a windows computer? Any windows computer running the same low end processors that chromebooks use are always a fail. An intel celeron is extremely slow processor typically clocking around 1.6 GHz. Most modern windows/mac devices run i5's or i7's which are very heavy duty processors. Chromebooks range from 2GB's of ram to 8GB's of ram. Most modern windows computers rely on at least 8GB's of ram to perform well and often use 16GB's of ram.

The fact is, the problem with chromebooks is support. They've got a small market share so they don't have as many PC based applications and they rely on portable 'apps' from the Android Store. But it's one of the only platforms that successfully handles both computer formfactor software and portable tablet applications. The ipad can't run anything web based nearly as well as a chromebook-- and the mac's/PC's of the world would never dream of having as many simple tablet form factor apps as the android store.

It's for a specific niche, that's for sure. But it accomplishes the goal it set out to accomplish exceedingly well.

 

[FAST6191]

Since Sony screwed off with support for the VITA so early, it's a real shame to see only Nintendo dominating the portable market. I'm really surprised Microsoft hasn't stepped in with something, but no one has, so it's just 3DS and Switch at this point.

If 3ds and Switch is Nintendo dominating I want to see something good.

 

[VitaType]

Home consoles all the time. Honestly, I rather see more companies in the portable market. The closest thing to that are so call gaming phones.

Idk. Nintendo is doing a fanstastic job with portables. Not just with fantastic first party support, but also with managing the 3rd party releases. Look e.g. at the library from GB, GBA and NDS (3DS also became good, but overall it was one of the less exciting game libraries). GB and NDS have some of the most diverse libraries of all consoles including home consoles and the quality of the wide range of fantastic titles also is, measured at limitations of there respective systems, high (the bad titles also get really worse, but that's not the point).
I wonder what you hope for. More portables would segment the market. I doub that the prices for handhelds would drop from such a competition since Nintendo always seems intressted in having good prices and I think performance-wise the NX is good not perfect but good.
If Sony would launch another handheld some of there studios could get creative thanks to handheld games in general beeing smaller projects, I would love to see what crazy and creative new ideas e.g. SIE Japan Studio would come-up with, but is that really worth the fragmentation? If you want to play Nintendo handheld games you would be forced to either buy two handhelds or get the worse version of many original handheld games and handheld adaptions due to the fact that Sony surely would go for more horse-power. M-Rated games already found there way back to handhelds on the NX so no win there.
I'm a fan from companies competing because it's good for us who buy from the companies, but in this case? Splitting the install base in a time where game developers have to decide if they want to make real games for real handhelds or for the much larger smartphone market? (lets face it most smartphone games just aren't that great games. Not many smartphone gamers are ready to pay 40 bucks on a single game unlike classic handheld gamers).

 

[pitterpatter]

So what do you think? Is there a space for a fourth competitor in the home console market?

Sorry fam, the souljaconsole has already got me covered

 

[Axido]

Who are those slightly mad people that want VR at only 60 fps? Show yourselves!

 

[wiewiec]

I am interested to see what is this console like... And good to see someone who is not buying old retro brand name with hope to join retro hype train and milk this crap.

 

[DavidKang]

"It's time to STOP!"

 

[Hakaisha]

I hope to see Ian Bell succeed with his proposed "Mad Box" idea. This news feels somewhat similar to the announcement of the original Xbox, which promised to be the most powerful console on the market at the time. It's at least refreshing to see someone offer up an idea that isn't just yet another unexciting TV box that offers up games as a streaming subscription service.

 

[spotanjo3]

YAWN!

 

[KyleHyde]

If this isn't handled well enough, I feel like it'll quickly disappear into obscurity never to be heard of again (like the Ouya).
Let's see how it goes.

 

[osaka35]

I mean, ps4 and xbox are PCs with a bit customized hardware (but close enough it's not hard to port between the two). I doubt this will be off-the-shelf components. Wonder if they'll run some flavour of unix (like sony uses/freeBSD) or windows (microsoft) or something else. Wonder if it'll have access to steam/similar things, or have built-in developer tools like unity. Or maybe it'll even be an ARM processor of some sort.

I'm always down for competition. They just have to have access to at least most of games as everyone else as well as allow for something new/unique/different/exciting. Let's see how close to the mark they get.

 

[FAST6191]

This news feels somewhat similar to the announcement of the original Xbox, which promised to be the most powerful console on the market at the time.

Slightly Mad Games is a UK private company (big companies that do crazy things don't tend to exist in Europe, and I assume if they had partnered with any kind of big finance firm we would know about it, do bear in mind this is likely a hardware project as well and those seldom come cheap), that made a few racing games (project cars, and the need for speed shit "spinoff" series) of reasonable quality. I went through https://www.mobygames.com/company/slightly-mad-studios-limited quickly just now and while there are some people I would sit for a beer with as they probably have some cool stories have not done anything particularly spectacular to my knowledge (they might have some high calibre people working there*, however nothing noted by anybody or immediately obvious).

*thinking ID software type talents. Granted amazing talent today is less prone to shine through, and probably only quite literally come through in the details. The project cars engine appears to be a crowd funded effort but otherwise done in house so there is at least that, though at the same time in this day and age rolling your own engine is not quite the same move it once was. It appears fairly well regarded though and a quick overview of its tech says is done by people that know what they are doing, albeit the final result I don't see bought by other devs a la unreal or unity or whatever.

This vs Microsoft who at the time had their own line of controllers (see sidewinder), the main OS used in the world (see Windows?), the main 3d graphics API used in the world of games (plus decent sound and input), their own development studios, was a publisher, had serious relationships with any number of devs/publishers, billions in the bank, was at least a major player in the hardware design (if MS rang do you not think Intel and AMD would answer?), worldwide recognition....

 

[anhminh]

Those game console wannabe company never understand: Nobody give a fuck how powerful your console is if you can't show us even one game developer back you up. You think it easy to be on the list of triple AAA multi-platform game? Even the most powerful gaming PC mean shit when no one make game on it. Most likely they will just run game from Steam and Android which raise the question "why not just buy phone and PC instead?" and we will be back to the dead end again.

There is no competition in console war because no small company have enough connection to get famous gaming developer to work on their console.

 

[MushGuy]

This idea is slightly mad

And personally, I prefer to wait until seeing what Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft have to offer for the next generation, too, but chances are that I'll still stick with Nintendo.

 

[XDel]

Stupid idea, and it will probably never come to pass.
That said, if they wanted this to work, what would probably work in your favor would be to incense the Dreamcast 2 title off of Sega, get their seal of approval, build up the hype machine so that it sounds as if Sega is directly involved in it, and there you go, they'd sell them selves pretty much, at least to a portion of the market, which would help build hype. Then all you'd need is proper support, and of course competent hardware.

Either way, I could care less, video games like Hollywood now a days are dead, lifeless, and a mere shadow of the art and creativity that went into once a long time ago. Now generally if something comes out that stands apart, it is because they have went back and re-discovered the core mechanics behind one of yesterday's classics; but I digress.

 

[Jonna]

I feel like this is the third or fourth time in the past 2 years some one has come up with this idea, all of which didn't wind up having anything significant happen.

Am I wrong?