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?

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[Steena]

Did the PC ever actually die? I remember sitting there back when all those articles were coming out and thinking that I am playing all these sweet games, and often the best versions of things that appeared on the consoles.

Anyway I don't think people are so much anti competition as much as most attempts at it are weak and practically doomed to failure. That then scuppers things for most people when hearing about future endeavours and all but forces cynicism when things are announced.

i undoubtedly agree that this project is either conceived for the 0.1% or will fail, as many had and many will; my problem is not that i hope to see people in a delusional state pretending it'll work out, it's that people don't want the failed project to happen at all, as if the company will take the losses off their wallets. people lose literally zero from it and you just add examples and opportunities to one day get more choice, so rejecting it is just dumb. For example, if i told you the failed early access fortnite would in 6 months time become the biggest mainstream game of all time, you'd put about less chances on it than seeing a 4th major console competitor. crazy things can happen because a lot of reasons can be a factor, especially in today's very hivemind information share-heavy market you get some starting hype and the ball can get rolling if the stars align.

As for PC, i'd consider that market extremely poor in around 2002-2007, as there were no big profile names and most the major companies shifted to doing console projects as that was becoming a growing market with sony taking over europe and then microsoft doing well in america. At least, if you compare it to pre-2000 and post-steam, those are two phases of exponentially higher profile libraries and in general companies that valued the platform. You couldn't boast a title of the caliber of FFX, and so on. Those were just relegated to consoles.

 

[FAST6191]

i undoubtedly agree that this project is either conceived for the 0.1% or will fail, as many had and many will; my problem is not that i hope to see people in a delusional state pretending it'll work out, it's that people don't want the failed project to happen at all, as if the company will take the losses off their wallets. people lose literally zero from it and you just add examples and opportunities to one day get more choice, so rejecting it is just dumb. For example, if i told you the failed early access fortnite would in 6 months time become the biggest mainstream game of all time, you'd put about less chances on it than seeing a 4th major console competitor. crazy things can happen because a lot of reasons can be a factor, especially in today's very hivemind information share-heavy market you get some starting hype and the ball can get rolling if the stars align.

As for PC, i'd consider that market extremely poor in around 2002-2007, as there were no big profile names and most the major companies shifted to doing console projects as that was becoming a growing market with sony taking over europe and then microsoft doing well in america. At least, if you compare it to pre-2000 and post-steam, those are two phases of exponentially higher profile libraries and in general companies that valued the platform. You couldn't boast a title of the caliber of FFX, and so on. Those were just relegated to consoles.

I don't recall the fortnite beta/early access effort, however I have seen plenty of multiplayer fads these last years, the DOTA/MOBA thing was dying off with stuff like DayZ or world of tanks pointing somewhere, and if I knew Epic (previous holders of several over the decades) were at the helm then yeah I would have said I could see a path. I wouldn't have got it but I would not have dismissed you out of hand.
I don't know if rejecting it it dumb. Investor fatigue (even among venture capital firms) is likely to set in, as well as fatigue in several other areas, if such things don't get choked off. Whether the people in your example would make such an argument, or at least have it as their underlying logic if asked "do you know why you are rejecting it?", is probably a different matter.
Similarly rejecting it was the right thing to do in this situation; if they had looked like they were going to do anything right (a release with no real information like this, no pedigree and no backers is far from that) then that would be one thing, this however felt more like a clueless business wonk trying something on ("we'll get some coders on, get an idea, handle the business stuff and make a mint" sort of thing). Go another and ask what has the hype train really ever given us? The ouya? The oculus rift? Nice lessons but expensive ones.


Back to the PC was Final Fantasy 10 a notable effort? I suppose in the lead up then 7, 8 at the time at least and 9 meant people were expecting a bit from it but I don't think people much cared there. I guess Japan was still relevant and if you ignore them (easy enough as a PC game playing type at that point and the points leading up to it) then I am not convinced.
Also was 2007 when Steam really took off? I don't know when the switch to it being a dominant/vital platform came but it was later than that (I had just built my then little beasty https://gbatemp.net/threads/new-pc-time.42858/ and was doing fine for several years after that). I shall have to wander the internet and seek out someone that chronicled the rise of the cult of steam. The Orange Box was late 2007 and that was considered its major push to be more than a crappy DRM system for Valve games.