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Comment by casabarata | Hacker News Reader

Pretty sweet. I wish this and the other 10 DIY/programmable mobile consoles would make it into mass market (toy?) stores. For years, this market has only been making circles in a tiny part of the geekosphere It’d be great to get it in the hands of everyone and then see what happens. Im sure you’ll get a surge of indie developers making and sharing games and kids in school showing off their latest creations.

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That is my ongoing issue with these "RPi" killers, they simply do not make it out to the mass market.

All of them seems to involve ordering directly from manufacturer.

Part of it I imagine is these hacker game systems are designed and marketed towards other gamer hackers and require, or at least the apparent need for,a more technical skill set than a regular game system.

However I can imagine something like Lego and Ninteno making a package that is designed for children to learn from.

Nintendo wants their customers to purchase games, because that's what drives their revenue. While the act of "making" is integral to Lego customers, the company hopes to sell customers more and more kits/bricks.

A self-contained user-programmable video game device probably needs more support and offers less recurring revenue opportunity than mass market game consumption platforms.

It's a terrible thing for a owners of a business to turn a reliable consumer of its products into a happy frugal maker.

I could have sworn that Nintendo is the only company of the 3 major console brands that do not sell the console at a loss.

I think they are, but I imagine the profit from their first party game IP and the licensing fees from other game publishers probably dwarfs that profit.

So, they shouldn't be in dire financial straits if they don't sell games, but it sure isn't the winning strategy.

I duno about the games focus. Nintendo loves selling the consoles too, over and over again if at all possible.

The combination of portability (at least the handheld devices) and the fact that many of the devices are owned by kids increases the chance that a device will be lost or broken, requiring replacement. Just like cell phones.

Nonetheless, if the expected profit from each game-maker device is less than the profit from each play-only device, why would a manufacturer of the latter make any of the former?

It was other times, but I still remember the first Spectrum kits being sold as DIY, so there is that nostalgia part as well.

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