I am going to be a part of a new company that will sell Android-based consoles for gaming on TVs using gamepads. The goal is to make affordable gaming consoles available to large audiences.<p>Earlier, I had figured out a few tricks and techniques to run top-selling Android games on the existing China TV boxes. The rest of the folks from this new company are good at operations, supply chain management, marketing, branding, and hiring. I am the last piece of the puzzle to handle the tech. We have already approached a couple of investors, and the future looks promising.<p>There are a lot of things to be figured out. How to run games on the stock TV ROM. If it is possible to extract the drivers and other modules, can I build my own OS by compiling it from the AOSP source? How do I keymap touch events to joystick gamepad events? How do I push the updates? How do we ensure these keymappings work by default for all screen sizes and resolutions?<p>The final question is: should I even be working on this problem statement full-time. I am going to get decent equity, but I feel the problem statement is overly simplified. I might have less time to learn or figure things out after the funding happens, and I might not have so much mental freedom to seek out and make mistakes.
What is this company doing that hasn't already been done to death? Nvidia has the Shield, Google TV with Chromecast can also run games and connect to external controllers, and so can the Fire TV and Apple TV. With modern streaming options like GeForce Now or Xbox Cloud Gaming or PSNow, you can also play AAA console games from any web browser and controller.<p>None of those require a special stack. Gamepad support is built into both Android and web browsers already. You can connect any Xbox or generic Bluetooth controller to your phone or Google TV, etc. and play some Android games with them.<p>Meanwhile standalone consoles like the Ouya, Stadia, Razer Forge TV, and others have all tried to do that and failed.<p>OP, sorry for being harsh, but I feel like this has already been tried so many times :( Is this new company really offering something different?
I have a NVIDIA shield which is the best Android media player despite being pricey. It has potential for games but I haven't really seen it. One problem is that the internal storage is not enough to play a "real" (say 5GB+ game) and that external storage doesn't seem to be terribly reliable despite trying a USB-attached "gaming" SSD.<p>And of course the games I have for it are Doom 3 (can't play because the license server won't let me), Pac Man 256, and Retroarch. I played through <i>Record of Agarest War</i> years ago but they took it out of the store.