In case you haven’t heard, Nvidia announced their entry into the handheld video game market: Project Shield. The Verge has video from CES presentation and demo, and other quality reporting on the announcement.
Shield is a handheld controller with a five inch flip up screen built in, powered by pure Android – which allows for all of Google’s standard Android apps to run on this as well. The killer feature is the PC-streaming feature, where you can stream nearly any PC game to the controller (provided you have a high end graphics card).
While there’s no price announced yet, it is scheduled for release in second quarter 2013 – soon. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo should be terrified about Nvidia’s entry into the video game hardware market. For years, Nvidia (and their competitor ATI/AMD) has been providing the videocards for the console game market. Despite Nvidia also selling videocards directly to the consumer market and PC manufacturers, it’s been a fairly positive relationship between the companies and very little competition until now. The battle for the mindshare of PC gamers and console gamers was considered two different arenas. Now, PC gamers have the possibility of not having to buy a console and the games again just to play on the TV or handheld. In addition, their Android based game library has a whole new home – the living room.
Provided this thing doesn’t flop, Sony and Nintendo will start to feel the pressure here from those not already in their own ecosystems. Nintendo has a fairly solid plan for targeting the population at large with “casual” games – outside of what is considered the ‘gaming market’ – but this is Sony’s territory. Black Friday 2013, folks out looking for a deal might be thinking about one of these instead of the PS4 – especially if they have an Android phone with a decent library of games. Yet, Sony has a solid handheld platform that is able to share games with the PS3. Microsoft has nothing.
Microsoft is probably hurt the most out of the three existing gaming giants because their mobile phone platform has not done well. They feel the same squeeze as the others for their console systems, but Microsoft has no answer for handheld or mobile gamers. Their only existing ace is the Halo series. If they don’t bring a Halo-caliber exclusive game to the handheld war, they will go nowhere with any attempts to enter the surprisingly crowded market this year.
Of course, this is a huge wager on Nvidia’s part. Console gamers are incredibly loyal to their favored brands. Newcomers are held to the highest standards. Yet, cash is king. If Nvidia is able to deliver on gamers only having to buy their favorite games once and being able to play those same games across multiple platforms (living room TV, PC, and handheld), they have a real winner.
Nvidia also announced the latest version of their mobile processors (the Tegra 4), and their latest version of their gaming servers, rebranded as the Nvidia Grid.