Blaze have announced that they will be releasing a new handheld designed for downloadable titles into the market. Priced at £100 why should you buy one?
Available from the 30th of March at the GameGadget.net online store, as it’s still in negotiations for retail release, the iPhone sized handheld will support games exclusively via download; the only problem is nobody knows what publishers are supporting the device.
Speaking to Eurogamer, Mark Garrett, the general manager of Blaze Europe said that “We’re in communication with all major publishers” and that an announcement about publishers and games should be cleared “in the next week or so”.
Pricing seems to be at the publishers discretion, however Blaze are aiming on providing cheap games thanks to its “open source” emulation platform that requires “no further development” to get the game running on the GameGadget. Essentially meaning you can expect a bucketload of ports. It seems that the GameGadget is aimed more at providing access to already released games in a new way, rather than a platform for new titles to emerge upon.
“It’s a very low-cost, low investment vehicle for getting games onto a digital platform,” Garrett said to Eurogamer.
“Because there’s no investment in bringing the games to the platform, we want the games to be as competitively priced as possible. As an estimate, we would want the games to start at £0 – there is an opportunity to offer free gaming – up to around the £1.49/£1.99 price-point for a single game,”
“And then a bundle of games – maybe 10 or 15 games – for around the £10 price point. Those are the sort of recommendations we’re making to publishers.”
The choice to ditch the now favoured touchscreen approach to portable gaming and go for “hard buttons” should only enhance the old-school charms of gamings yesteryear greats.
“Ultimately what we’re looking to do is enable people to save money over the long-term by offering a more cost effective solution for obtaining more and more content.”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DO4QEBqtZ4s&w=480&h=274]
The GameGadget specs are: 433mhz dual core CPU, 64MB RAM / 2GB Flash RAM and a 3.5″ LCD screen (320×240) that does the appropriate 16BIT colour. It has a Li-Ion rechargeable battery. Button wise there is your typical d-pad, as well as four face buttons, two shoulder buttons and a start/select/reset buttons. The device also contains a stereo speaker, headphone and TV output jacks and a Micro-USB port and SD/SDHC storage ports.