May 10, 2004

Infinium Announces Phantom Game Service, Fails to Mention Games

This press release (PDF) should contain everything you need to know about the forthcoming Infinium Labs "game receiver". I won't bore you with all the details but should point out a few interesting facts about the Phantom:

  • "The receiver for the Phantom Gaming Service can sit in any room in the home, connected to the TV and any broadband Internet connection, and be used by various members of the household at different times of day." This should allay any fears that the Phantom game reciever is powered by the moon or that it has mysogynist tendencies.

  • "Should the hard drive approach capacity, the service will recognize this and will manage the cache in the background, invisible to the user, removing those games that were played least recently." I'm sure that this sentence is intended to be read as "The user will be able to manage his or her current library of titles and determine which games to remove from the drive."

  • "In a game industry first, the company plans to provide the Phantom Gaming Service hardware free of charge to consumers who sign a two-year contract for a basic subscription to its flagship online gaming service at $29.95 per month." I guess this is technically correct since a free Dreamcast based on a 2-year subscription to Seganet was billed at $21.95 per month.

  • "With the Phantom Gaming Service, publishers can get a title to gamers within hours of when the gold master is cut,” Bachus said. “They hand us a disc, and we’ll do the rest, making it available to consumers in record time because we don’t have to deal with physical manufacturing and distribution." This sounds like a great deal for development houses who do not plan to follow a traditional publishing model, but I find it hard to believe that traditional publishers will allow any release to be available on the Phantom Game Service in advance of its appearance on retail shelves.

More questions than answers, I'm afraid, come from this press release. However, at this point, the one answer I do have for Infinium is "no thanks, not interested".

Posted by geek