PlayJam’s GameStick is currently being developed, having undergone a redesign recently and plans to launch a month after OUYA ships out to backers of their Kickstarter campaign and a retail release in June 2013, and in an interview PlayJam’s chief marketing officer Anthony Johnson talks about OUYA as a competitor, retail backing and how GameStick may be updated with new hardware.
In an interview with Redbull… yes Redbull the energy drink company… Anthony talked about quite a few issue people seem to be curious about. While we won’t go into everything here, we will touch on the major points that are brought up during the interview.
For starters, PlayJam is considering almost the same style of updating as OUYA will be doing, releasing a new unit every year with new hardware which is how mobile devices are updated. This isn’t a confirmed thing just yet but PlayJam is throwing the idea around fairly seriously. Their only other option would be to release a new GameStick every 2-years since it isn’t really hackable like OUYA is.
Apparently PlayJam has also been approached by major retailers regarding having the GameStick in stock and available in-store for sale. While the company didn’t go into specifics about who those companies are, we can easily take a guess that at least a couple of them are the same retailers who will be stocking OUYA units in-store as well.
As for OUYA being a direct competitor to GameStick, PlayJam is apparently just fine with that and even welcome it. Anthony mentioned that GameStick has a few advantages over OUYA such as the fact it is a bit more mobile than OUYA and that the company had already built a back-end platform to power games on TV where OUYA has had to start both the hardware and software end of things from scratch.
Jumping into a hardware play was a change from our core business, that’s for sure. A lot of the complexity in bringing a product like GameStick to market is actually the found in the systems and software that drives the service. In that respect, we have a massive advantage having already built a back end platform to power games on TV. – PlayJam’s chief marketing officer Anthony Johnson
On a slightly more interesting note, PlayJam is apparently in talks with a few major MMO companies that have very established titles already out for people to play in regards to bringing these MMO games over to GameStick. While PlayJam couldn’t disclose details about who and what games, due to talks being under NDA, if these talks should success it would be a very big boost to GameStick.
If you’re interested in reading the entire interview with Anthony Johnson, hit up the link below and take a few minutes to enjoy your morning coffee and read everything he talks about.
Website Referenced: Anthony Johnson Interview
