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Creators compare the $250 crowdfunded console's power to a chip from a $100 2016 smartphone.
What the heck’s an Intellivision Amico? Console’s leaky dev portal offers hints
Creators compare the $250 crowdfunded console's power to a chip from a $100 2016 smartphone.
arstechnica.com
Ars' usually decent reporting on the incoming shit show that is Amico:
The Intellivision developer portal was recently publicly available online, no password needed, for long enough to have the details saved at archive.org earlier this month. Sources with knowledge about Amico have confirmed to Ars Technica that the leaked specs we've seen were legitimate. While the specs were live as recently as June 14 and line up with Amico's own official specs page, they could still change between now and the system's launch.
The developer portal calls out Qualcomm's Smart Display 200 platform—and specifies its "APQ8053-Lite" model, which includes a 1.8GHz Snapdragon 624, an Adreno 506 GPU, 2GB of LPDDR3 DRAM, 16GB of Flash storage, and built-in controllers for interfaces like HDMI, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth (but not Ethernet). While prices on bulk-manufactured SoC motherboards can vary for many reasons, this one appears to be available in bulk orders at rates near $38 per board (though that one includes a camera sensor, which Amico will not have in either its primary box or its controllers).
Many of Amico's "Ten Commandments" are referenced repeatedly throughout the portal, but one is not: the "Intellivision Quality Control Scale." After combing through the archived dev portal, I only found one subjective clarification, that the scale "touches on all three tenets of sensible, simple, and fun." One rule, buried in the dev portal, mandates no less than 30 fps refreshes in terms of visual performance, which hopefully means the stuttering frame rates in some Amico preview videos will be remedied by the time those games launch. (To be fair, some revealed games appear to run at 60 fps, but we haven't seen whether that performance will translate to final Amico hardware.)
Online multiplayer gaming is not mentioned anywhere in the portal, while one huge development consideration is missing from the above image: a strict attitude about downloadable updates and patches. Intellivision warns its devs that patches should be "a very rare occurrence (a great exception) and not be counted on as a way to extend development time or postpone needed improvements to your game." The same section recommends that game makers "limit the size and scope of your game to what you can test completely."
As seen in the above image, Intellivision caps Amico game prices at $10, and there's no DLC workaround—"no upselling of downloadable content and no in-app purchases," the guidelines declare. Intellivision also insists that any game sold for Amico should be "a complete, high-quality game [with] hours of fun."
My admittedly subjective response to this restriction is a bit ambivalent. I hate predatory add-on content like loot boxes, and I appreciate one-and-done game purchases. But I also recognize that $10 as a maximum game price, within an unproven, brand-new digital marketplace, inherently limits the scope of how much a game company can expect to earn from even a highly successful game (and, in turn, how much they can afford to devote to development). A lockdown on patch support also means online multiplayer in Amico games would be inherently difficult to support, since online modes tend to expose issues like character balance and cheat exploits.
Worse, the profit margins for third-party devs on Amico might not be great. In a video shared with Ars Technica that Tallarico filmed as a pitch to angel investors in March 2021, he estimated that Intellivision takes "around 50 percent" of third-party game-sales revenue—well above the 30 percent cut that has proven controversial for the likes of Apple.
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