Ask HN: TV Consoles for Android Gaming – Joining Company with Equity

[s3arch]

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.

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.

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?

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.

[solardev]

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.

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.

Meanwhile standalone consoles like the Ouya, Stadia, Razer Forge TV, and others have all tried to do that and failed.

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?

[PaulHoule]

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.

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 Record of Agarest War years ago but they took it out of the store.

[s3arch → PaulHoule]

The recent TV box I have has 8 GB of RAM and 64 GB of ROM. Will this still be insufficient to play games?

As a hardcore gamer, how many games would you install at a time? How much could the total size of those installed games be?

[PaulHoule → s3arch]

I have a refurb XBOX One with a 2TB hard drive, it's probably about 40% full right now. I also have a jailbroken Nintendo 3DS with a 32GB card that is about 70% full and has a huge number of games on it including some of the largest that came out for that platform.

In terms of high-end mobile games though, I have some interest in playing titles like Genshin Impact, Nikke, Fate/Grand Order and Azur Lane on my 32GB iPad. A game like that is usually a 2GB download from the app store and then it installs another 10GB worth of levels. Practically I can fit exactly one of these titles on my iPad but then there is no staging space left to update iPadOS. Often I want to play and find it has to download the 10GB package again which is not 100% reliable even at the office.

I wind up uninstalling those games because it just isn't fun.

You could make a good 12GB game in most genres and I could be happy if I could just play 1 game without drama, but having 3 games that size installed would be good.

I think though the royal road to software for you would be to attract ports from other platforms, if they don't have to do a lot of work getting storage requirements down they'll be more inclined to do it. It may help that a lot of work is already being done to shoehorn games for the Switch.

[s3arch → PaulHoule]

How could the legal aspect affect here allowing ported games to played from another platform?

[PaulHoule → s3arch]

I was imagining that you'd convince the publishers to port games. It could be something new or something classic: imagine GTA: San Andreas on Android TV or the Shield.